Issues on the Compatibility of Web Service Contracts

Introduction

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model is being promoted for use in the development of the next generation of large scale distributed applications. These applications are comprised of a collection of independent, autonomous, abstract services that are provided by business partners and third party service providers. Though the model is simple, the SOA vision of large-scale, cross-organizational distributed applications may be difficult to achieve due to the issues of incompatibility of service contracts and their respective implementations.

Some of the most significant issues arise because the SOA model is based on an abstraction paradigm, with internal operations of the service deliberately hidden. The service is defined solely through the sequence of messages communicated. Hoare (Hoare, 1995) and Milner (Milner, 1989) recognized this in their seminal works in process algebra. Such system descriptions that abstract away internal operations may result in composed behaviors that differ from each other despite apparently offering the same message sequence inputs and outputs. Potentially, these differences lead to undesirable behaviors such as deadlocks or starvation. Avoiding these undesirable service behaviors may be achieved by composing this type of system with an “adaptor” that essentially prohibits those undesirable states ever being reached, while still preserving the external communication. This approach is an active area of research within the business process community (Benatallah, Casati, Grigori, Nezhad & Touami,2005). However, these adaptors are typically written by the service providers themselves. Because they are written by and are a part of the provider’s service, the provider has had the opportunity to be aware of some of the internal operations of the service. They have “looked inside the box” and realized the operations that lead to undesirable behaviors. In this book chapter, we present an alternative methodology and support tools that allow the rigorous development of service contracts and their implementations. This methodology is able to assure completeness, acceptable consistent state and termination for the service. There is no requirement to “look inside the box” in order to achieve a composed system that behaves as expected, and there is no need to build specialized adaptors.