Aspect-Oriented Workflow Languages

Abstract

Erklärung: Hiermit erkläre ich, daß ich die vorliegende Arbeit selbstständig und unter ausschließlicher Verwendung der angegebenen Quellen und Hilfsmittel angefertigt habe. Darmstadt, den 12. Dezember 2006To my parents,To my wife, To my brother and my sister AcknowledgmentsFirstly, I would like to thank sincerely my advisor Prof. Dr. Mira Mezini for giving me the chance to work in her team, for her support and guidance during the three years of my PhD work, and for providing valuable feedback on early drafts of this thesis. I am also grateful to Prof. Dr. Gustavo Alonso for being the second advisor of this dissertation.Moreover, I thank the German Science Foundation (DFG) for supporting this work in the framework of the research school on Electronic Commerce at Darmstadt University of Technology. I also thank the Tunisian Ministry of Higher Education for having supported my previous studies in Computer Science at Munich University of Technology.In addition, I am indebted to all my colleagues at the Software Technology Group and at the Aspect-Oriented Programming Group for the excellent and productive working environment. I thank Gudrun Jörs for her continuous support.I am also grateful to Tom Dinkelaker, Slim Kallel, Vaidas Gasiunas, Sven Kloppenburg, and Michael Eichberg for proof-reading parts of this thesis and/or for giving feedback on the dissertation talk. Thanks also to Prof. Dr. Klaus Ostermann, who allowed me to reuse the Latex template of his dissertation.My students Andreas Heizenreder, Benjamin Schmeling, and Leo Shang contributed to the work described in this thesis by implementing some parts of the process container framework and the AO4BPEL engine in the context of their diploma thesis.Last but certainly not least, I thank deeply my family for their infinite support. I am indebted to my dear parents who encouraged me to study abroad and to pursue my doctoral studies. I owe much of this success to my wife for her support during the difficult time of writing this thesis. I thank my sister and my brother for their love. AbstractThis thesis focuses on the modularity of workflow process specifications. In particular, it studies the expression support for crosscutting concerns and workflow changes in current workflow languages and workflow management systems. To illustrate the issues, two workflow languages are considered: a visual graphbased language and the Web Service composition language BPEL.This thesis starts by describing the implementation of several crosscutting concerns such as data collection for billing, activity execution time measurement, and security in typical processes of a travel agency. When examining the resulting workflow specifications, the following observations are made.First, the workflow constructs that implement a crosscutting concern cannot be encapsulated in a separate module with a well-defined interface. They are rather scattered across the specifications of several workflow processes. Second, the workflow specifications that result after adding the implementation of a cro...

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