Web services: beyond component-based computing
Communications of the ACM
Event-Based Interaction Management for Composite E-Services in eFlow
Information Systems Frontiers
Using Workflows to Coordinate Web Services in Pervasive Computing Environments
ICWS '04 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services
Cooperating Services for Data-Driven Computational Experimentation
Computing in Science and Engineering
Extending BPEL for Run Time Adaptability
EDOC '05 Proceedings of the Ninth IEEE International EDOC Enterprise Computing Conference
Putting Web Services in Context
Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS)
Towards dynamic monitoring of WS-BPEL processes
ICSOC'05 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Service-Oriented Computing
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Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) business processes are increasingly used by organizations to automate their business activities. As the pace of change in an organization increases, these processes will be required to be more flexible; to do so they will have to account for an increasing amount of changing environment state, or context. This poses significant challenges for WS-BPEL programmers, who have to source, track, and update context from multiple entities in addition to implementing and maintaining core business logic. In this paper we present a solution to this problem based on the definition and use of context variables. We describe how context variables can be constructed using the WS-BPEL language extension mechanism, and then outline an architecture for representing, sourcing, and propagating context in a web-services environment using existing web-services standards and frameworks. We also propose additional WS-BPEL language enhancements that will increase the utility of context variables and offer WS-BPEL programmers new ways of interacting with environment state. We have implemented a prototype realizing our approach and present a purchase-and-shipping scenario as an example of its use.