Web Service Composition Languages: Old Wine in New Bottles?

  • Authors:

  • Wil M. P. van der Aalst;Marlon Dumas;Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • EUROMICRO '03 Proceedings of the 29th Conference on EUROMICRO
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Recently, several languages for web service compositionhave emerged (e.g., BPEL4WS and WSCI). The goal ofthese languages is to glue web services together in aprocess-oriented way. For this purpose, these languagestypically borrow concepts from workflow management systemsand embed these concepts in the so-called "web servicesstack". Up to now, little or no effort has been dedicatedto systematically evaluate the capabilities and limitationsof these languages. BPEL4WS for example is said tocombine the best of other standards for web service compositionsuch as WSFL (IBM) and XLANG (Microsoft), and allowsfor a mixture of block structured and graph structuredprocess models. However, aspects such as the expressiveness,adequacy, orthogonality, and formal characterizationof BPEL4WS (e.g. reachability) have not yet been systematicallyinvestigated. Although BPEL4WS is not a bad proposal,it is remarkable how much attention it receives whilemore fundamental issues such as semantics, expressiveness,and adequacy do not get the attention they deserve. Therefore,we advocate the use of more rigorous approaches tocritically evaluate the so-called standards for web servicescomposition, and to learn from 25 years of experiences inthe workflow/office automation domain.