Flexible Binding for Reusable Composition of Web Services

In addition to publishing composite services as reusable services, compositions can also be reused by applying them to orchestrate different component services. To do so, it is important to describe compositions using flexible bindings, which define only the minimal constraints on the syntax and semantics of the services to be composed. This way, the choice of which service to invoke can be delayed to later stages in the life cycle of the composition. In the context of Web service composition, we refine the concept of binding beyond the basic distinction of static and dynamic binding. Bindings can be evaluated during the design, the compilation, the deployment, the beginning of the execution of a composition, or just before the actual service invocation takes place. Considering the current limited support of dynamic binding in the BPEL service composition language, we show how we addressed the problem in JOpera, where modeling bindings does not require a specific language construct as it can be considered a special application of reflection.