Researching the SOA to better enable the user in workflow orchestration

Abstract

The potential of web services is still not being exploited as it should be. Web services are still used by a few people and mostly by organizations rather than by all the people that have access to a personal computer and an internet connection. Web services could be used in a lot of possible ways to make the workflows we usually need in our daily lives and business processes much easier to construct. The workflows we create can be used for anything from interfacing to hardware and creating the usual workflows we usually do when for example we get our photos from a digital camera connected to a PC and then printing them to the most complicated business process involving a multitude of transactions and human interactions. These workflows allow you to adopt and design your style of doing things. People currently compose web services using windows applications where first of all they identify the services they want to include and through their WSDL files the application allows them to create workflows graphically using BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). The application also checks that in these workflows all services have the correct input and output parameters. What we propose here will not invent any new standards but we will make use of the widely adopted web services standards and BPEL in order to compose our workflows in a graphical way. We will make our system available through a very user friendly portal interface that will access a web services centre server. The server will provide the user with intelligent search facilities and a categorized view of the available web services. The server will also take care of recommending related web services and automatically composed web services to its users so that they might include them in their workflows. The user will be working on an online visual editor which will generate the BPEL code required to actualize the user's composition. This BPEL code can then be deployed and run either on the server's BPEL engine which in turn provides the user with the results resulting from the instance of the running process. This would also automatically allow the user to gain access to monitoring and interacting with their processes. Also the user will be able to download the BPEL code which the user can run on any other BPEL engine the user may want to use. Once their workflows are build and working they can be saved in the users' personal accounts and accessed whenever the need arises.