Instructors

Luciano Baresi, Politecnico di Milano
Sam Guinea, Politecnico di Milano

Abstract

This tutorial introduces self-healing Web services as a solution to cope with the dynamism and flexibility required by modern software systems. Current technologies (WSDL, WS-BPEL, etc.) are not enough to address these issues; however, they are a good starting point for the analysis of the current situation and for building towards the future.

The tutorial motivates the need for dynamism and flexibility by presenting scenarios taken from different application domains. It also categorizes the existing WS-* technologies, focusing on the most important ones.

The core part of the tutorial characterizes the deployment and execution of self-healing Web services in three separate phases: (1) a composition phase, in which the designer concentrates on discovering (or implementing) services that provide certain behaviors and/or quality of service; (2) a monitoring phase, in which it is paramount to understand if a given service behaves correctly (with respect to functional and non-functional requirements); (3) a recovery phase, in which the system must react to anomalies by means of suitable replanning or recovery actions.

Each phase is discussed with respect to available technologies and prominent research proposals. In conclusion, the tutorial summarizes the main topics, presents a list of still-to-be-solved problems, and highlights possible directions for future research.

Biographies

Luciano Baresi is an associate professor of computer science at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He also was a guest professor at the University of Oregon (USA) and at the University of Paderborn (Germany). His main research interests are in service-centric applications, dynamic software architectures, and model-based transformations.

Luciano has published his work in international journals and presented it at the main international conferences. He has served on the program committees of several conferences, and he is the program co-chair for FASE 2006. Luciano has also given several tutorials in the past regarding service-oriented computing, Web quality, and graph transformations.

Sam Guinea is a PhD student at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. His main research interests are in service-oriented applications. He has published papers in international conferences and given a tutorial on service oriented computing.