An Architectural Style for Process-Intensive Web Information Systems

REpresentational State Transfer (REST) is the architecture style behind the World Wide Web (WWW), allowing for many desirable quality attributes such as adaptability and interoperability. However, as many process-intensive Web information systems do not make use of REST, they often do not achieve these qualities. This paper addresses this issue by proposing RESTful Business Processes (RESTfulBP), an architectural style that adapts REST principles to Web-based business processes. RESTfulBP views processes and activities as transferrable resources by representing them as process fragments associated with a set of standard operations. Distributed process fragments interoperate by adhering to these operations and exchanging process information. The process information contains basic workflow patterns that are used for dynamic process coordination at runtime. We validate our approach through an industry case study.

[1]  Roy Fielding,et al.  Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures"; Doctoral dissertation , 2000 .

[2]  Hagen Overdick.  Towards Resource-Oriented BPEL , 2007, WEWST.

[3]  Udo Kannengiesser,et al.  Process Flexibility: A Design View and Specification Schema , 2009, EMISA.

[4]  Michael M. Gorlick,et al.  From representations to computations: the evolution of web architectures , 2007, ESEC-FSE '07.

[5]  Sam Ruby,et al.  RESTful Web Services , 2007 .

[6]  Jeffrey V. Nickerson,et al.  Developing web services choreography standards - the case of REST vs. SOAP , 2005, Decis. Support Syst..

[7]  Liming Zhu,et al.  Resource-Oriented Architecture for Business Processes , 2008, 2008 15th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference.

[8]  I. Kuleshov,et al.  Ieee International Workshop on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications Interoperability Challenges for Ws-bpel Standard , 2022 .

[9]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Workflow Patterns , 2003, Distributed and Parallel Databases.

[10]  Santhosh Kumaran,et al.  A RESTful Architecture for Service-Oriented Business Process Execution , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering.

[11]  Liming Zhu,et al.  An architecting method for distributed process-intensive systems , 2009, 2009 Joint Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture & European Conference on Software Architecture.

[12]  Savas Parastatidis,et al.  An Introduction to the SOAP Service Description Language , 2005 .

[13]  Ali Arsanjani,et al.  Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture for Realization of an SOA , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC'06).

[14]  J. M. Troya,et al.  Component Interoperability , 2000 .

[15]  Pearl Brereton,et al.  Component-Based Systems: A Classification of Issues , 2000, Computer.

[16]  Paul J. Leach,et al.  An HTTP Extension Framework , 2000, RFC.

[17]  Tim Berners-Lee,et al.  Uniform Resource Locators (URL) , 1994, RFC.

[18]  Cesare Pautasso,et al.  BPEL for REST , 2008, BPM.

[19]  Li-zhen Cui,et al.  A Collaborative Framework for Exception Handling in Business Process Execution , 2007, 2007 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design.

[20]  Liam O'Brien,et al.  Quality Attributes and Service-Oriented Architectures , 2005 .

[21]  Eugene Miya,et al.  On "Software engineering" , 1985, SOEN.