Instructors

Liang Chen, University College London
Wolfgang Emmerich, University College London
Bruno Wassermann, University College London
Howard Foster, Imperial College London

Abstract

Service oriented software architectures are gaining increasing interest for the automation of business processes and the integration of IT systems, both within and across organisational boundaries. The combination of single web services into a more complex web service is called orchestration and is a crucial building block for service oriented architectures. This half day tutorial is aimed at both researchers and practitioners who want to understand how web service orchestration is achieved with the industry standard Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). Following a brief introduction into the concepts of orchestration and choreography we will discuss the rationale of the language concepts in detail and discuss how they are used in the orchestration of autonomous web services. We will discuss advanced concepts, such as asynchronous service invocation, message correlation and compensation handling required to achieve fault tolerance in long-running workflows. We discuss how to engineer web services that can be easily orchestrated. We conclude by outlining software engineering research challenges that arise out of the emergence of web service orchestration.

Biographies

Wolfgang Emmerich is Professor of Distributed Computing in the Department of Computer Science at University College London. His research interests are in principles, methods and tools for the systematic construction of large-scale distributed systems. Wolfgang is a member of the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. He will be PC-Co Chair of ICSE in 2007. Wolfgang has delivered numerous tutorials on different topics at software engineering conferences, including ICSE 97, ICSE 98, ICSE 99, ICSE 2000, ICSE 2002 and ESEC/FSE 97.

Liang Chen and Bruno Wassermann are Research Fellows in the Department of Computer Science at UCL. They are employed on a grant from the UK Engineering and Physical Research Council to develop a BPEL-based environment for the orchestration of scientific workflows. Liang has an Advanced MSc in Distributed Computing, Networks and Distributed Systems and an MSc in Computer Science, both from UC and an undergraduate degree from the University of Central Lancashire and Shenzhen University. Bruno holds a MSc from UCL.

Howard Foster is a Research Fellow in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. His research interests include static analysis and software development environments. During his PhD research he investigated the use of model checking techniques, particularly labelled transition system analysis, for the static analysis of BPEL workflows.