E-Service Composition Tools from a Lifecycle Perspective

This chapter provides not only an overview of the current standard development in service composition, but also practical guidance on selecting and developing service composition tools. Service-oriented programming has come to be perceived as the key technology to leverage enterprise collaboration, moving from data and information sharing to business process integration. Most tools available fully automated service composition. This chapter takes a unique lifecycle view on evaluating Web service composition tools. It first identifies the desired properties at each stage of a composite service's lifecyle, then apply the criteria on evaluating both semi-automatic and automatic service composition tools. Current work on semi-automatic service composition mostly focuses on usability and is often processoriented. The main task in this paradigm is connecting the input and output of available service components. On the other hand, automated service composition tools concentrate on the state of the world and the state transitions in the domain providing a list of actions or operators. Composition planners are used to automatically generate a list of applicable composition plans for flexible service composition. Consequently, tools supporting both usability and flexibility are scarce. Also, the integration with various verification and monitoring mechanisms to ensure failure recovery with secure and robust execution is not realised in any of the reviewed service composition tools.