Automatic synthesis of behavior protocols for composable web-services

Abstract

Web-services are broadly considered as an effective means to achieve interoperability between heterogeneous parties of a business process and offer an open platform for developing new composite web-services out of existing ones. In the literature many approaches have been proposed with the aim to automatically compose web-services. All of them assume that, along with the webservice signature, some information is provided about how clients interacting with the web-service should behave when invoking it. We call this piece of information the web-service behavior protocol. Unfortunately, in the practice this assumption turns out to be unfounded. To address this need, in this paper we propose a method to automatically derive from the web-service signature an automaton modeling its behavior protocol. The method, called StrawBerry, combines synthesis and testing techniques. In particular, synthesis is based on data type analysis. The conformance between the synthesized automaton and the implementation of the corresponding web-service is checked by means of testing. The application of StrawBerry to the Amazon E-Commerce Service shows that it is practical and realistic.

Automated Integration of Service-Oriented Software Systems

“…Construction takes as input the set of observation data and produces a (partial) model of the observed service. This model represents the observed behaviours enriched with inferred information that is relevant for achieving G. For instance, as done in [11], the collection of the SOAP responses to WS operation invocations, enriched with the inferred partial order of the invocations, can be represented as an automaton that models the interaction protocol of the observed WS. Note that, as it is shown in Section 3, having a partial model of the interaction protocol, for each observed WS to be integrated, is sufficient to automatically synthesize the code of proxies that allow for integrating the WSs so to realize the specified BPMN2 choreography.…”

“…Note that, as it is shown in Section 3, having a partial model of the interaction protocol, for each observed WS to be integrated, is sufficient to automatically synthesize the code of proxies that allow for integrating the WSs so to realize the specified BPMN2 choreography. An important aspect is that the elicit phase produces models that, although partial, are still good enough to achieve G. Goal driven elicitation can be very effective, e.g., as observed on the Amazon E-commerce WS (AEWS) where we apply the approach in [11] to elicit the AEWS interaction protocol. The experiment considered a goal-independent elicitation versus a goaldriven one [5].…”

“…Goal driven elicitation can be very effective, e.g., as observed on the Amazon E-commerce WS (AEWS) where we apply the approach in [11] to elicit the AEWS interaction protocol. The experiment considered a goal independent elicitation versus a goal driven one [5].…”

“…The following section summarizes the elicit technique that we describe in detail in [11]. It represents a specific realization of the elicit phase, which is suitable for producing the interaction protocol of a WS.…”

“…By taking as input a syntactical description of the WS signature, expressed by means of the WSDL notation, StrawBerry [11] derives in an automated way a partial ordering relation among the invocations of the different WSDL operations. This partial ordering relation is represented as an automaton that we call Behavior Protocol automaton.…”