Declarative composition and peer-to-peer provisioning of dynamic Web services

Abstract

The development of new services through the integration of existing ones has gained a considerable momentum as a means to create and streamline business-to-business collaborations. Unfortunately, as Web services are often autonomous and heterogeneous entities, connecting and coordinating them in order to build integrated services is a delicate and time-consuming task. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a system through which existing Web services can be declaratively composed, and the resulting composite services can be executed following a peer-to-peer paradigm, within a dynamic environment. This system provides tools for specifying composite services through statecharts, data conversion rules, and provider selection policies. These specifications are then translated into XML documents that can be interpreted by peer-to-peer inter-connected software components, in order to provision the composite service without requiring a central authority.