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A WSDL-based type system for asynchronous WS-BPEL processes

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Abstract

We tackle the problem of providing rigorous formal foundations to current software engineering technologies for web services, and especially to WSDL and WS-BPEL, two of the most used XML-based standard languages for web services. We focus on a simplified fragment of WS-BPEL sufficiently expressive to model asynchronous interactions among web services in a network context. We present this language as a process calculus-like formalism, that we call ws-calculus, for which we define an operational semantics and a type system. The semantics provides a precise operational model of programs, while the type system forces a clean programming discipline for integrating collaborating services. We prove that the operational semantics of ws-calculus and the type system are ‘sound’ and apply our approach to some illustrative examples. We expect that our formal development can be used to make the relationship between WS-BPEL programs and the associated WSDL documents precise and to support verification of their conformance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Viale Morgagni, 65, 50134, Firenze, Italy

    A. Lapadula, R. Pugliese & F. Tiezzi

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  1. A. Lapadula
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  2. R. Pugliese
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  3. F. Tiezzi
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Correspondence to F. Tiezzi.

Additional information

The work presented in this paper is a much extended and revised version of Lapadula et al. [52], and has been partially supported by EU Project “Software Engineering for Service-Oriented Overlay Computers” (SENSORIA), IST-2005-016004.

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Lapadula, A., Pugliese, R. & Tiezzi, F. A WSDL-based type system for asynchronous WS-BPEL processes. Form Methods Syst Des 38, 119–157 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-010-0110-0

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