Adapt or Perish: Algebra and Visual Notation for Service Interface Adaptation

Abstract

Abstract. The proliferation of services on the web is leading to the formation of service ecosystems wherein services interact with one another in ways not necessarily foreseen during their development or deployment. A key challenge in this setting is service mediation: the act of retrofitting existing services by intercepting, storing, transforming, and (re-)routing messages going into and out of these services so they can interact in unforeseen manners. This paper addresses a sub-problem of service mediation, namely service interface adaptation, that arises when the interface that a service provides does not match the interface that it is expected to provide in a given interaction. The paper focuses on reconciling mismatches between behavioural interfaces, i.e. interfaces that capture ordering constraints between interactions. It presents a declarative approach to service interface adaptation based on: (i) an algebra over behavioural interfaces; and (ii) a visual language that allows pairs of provided-required interfaces to be linked through algebraic expressions. These expressions are fed into an execution engine that intercepts, buffers, transforms and forwards messages to enact the adaptation logic.

Algorithms Based on Pattern Analysis for Verification and Adapter Creation for Business Process Composition

“…An interesting approach to interface adaptation is given in [9]. It is based on new operators like flow, gather, scatter, collapse, burst and hide.…”

On-the-Fly Dependable Mediation between Heterogeneous Networked Systems

“…Interoperability and mediation have been investigated in several contexts, among which protocol conversion [14][15][16], integration of heterogeneous data sources [17], software architecture [18], architectural patterns [19], design patterns [20], patterns of connectors [21,22], Web services [23][24][25][26][27], and algebra to solve mismatches [28] to mention a few.…”

Managing Changes for Service Based Business Processes

“…These researches normally focus on processes and study the process schema evolution and/or process instance migration. In the SOC paradigm, change management has been studied from different aspects including service adaptation [11], [12], change management for service protocols [13], [14], BPEL process [15], [16] and service oriented organization [23], and service evolution [9], [10].…”

“…They are inherently inadequate to support change management goals in service oriented environment. Quite a few researches have been published about service evolution [9], [10], service adaptation [11], [12], change management for service protocols [13], [14] and BPEL processes [15], [16]. These researches only consider the features of services without considering the associated business processes.…”