Implementation of business processes in service-oriented systems

Service-oriented software systems (SOSS) are the most promising philosophy, methodology and tool of contemporary software engineering. SOSS are virtual peer-to-peer networks of autonomous software components behaving like the services in real world mass service systems. However, service-oriented systems have no inherent tool to support business processes. The paper proposes an implementation of business processes in SOSS allowing them to meet practical requirements. The implementation can be easily improved to allow datastores to be integrated into SOSS and used together with the classical message passing middleware. It indicates that service orientation is based on a paradigm different from the object-oriented one. The proposed solution leads to a specific structure of peer-to-peer architecture and requires development cycle aspects substantially different from the classical software development cycle.