A Framework for Managing the Evolution of Business Protocols in Web Services

Web services are loosely coupled software components that are published, discovered, and invoked across the Web. As the use of Web services grows, in order to correctly interact with the growing services, it is important to understand the business protocols that provide clients with the information on how to interact with services. In dynamic Web services environments, service providers need to constantly refine their business protocols in order to reflect the constraints and opportunities proposed by new applications, new business strategies, and new laws, or fix the problems found in the protocol definition. However, the effective management of such a protocol evolution raises challenging problems: one of the most challenging issues is to handle ongoing instances started with the old protocol when their protocols are changed. We present a framework that supports service administrators in managing business protocol evolution by providing several features, such as a set of change operators allowing modifications of protocols and two types of change impact analyses automatically determining which ongoing instances can be migrated to the new version of a protocol. We have also implemented a database-backed GUI tool to manage the change process as an extension of our existing system.