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Orchestrating web services using Reo: from circuits and behaviors to automatically generated code

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Abstract

We present a compositional construction of web services, using Reo and constraint automata as the main “glue” ingredients. Reo is a graphical and exogenous coordination language based on channels. We propose a framework that, taking as input the behavioral description of services (as constraint automata), their WSDL interfaces, and the description of their interaction in Reo, generates all the necessary Java code to orchestrate the services in practice. For each web service, we automatically generate a proxy that manages the communication between this service and the Reo circuit. Although we focus on web services, we can compose different kinds of service-oriented and component technologies at the same time (e.g., CORBA, RPC, WCF), by generating different proxies and connecting them to the same coordinator.

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Notes

  1. The issue of whether the final translation from an automaton to Java code preserves that automaton’s semantics is important to address, but orthogonal and beyond the scope of this work.

  2. However, channels do not necessarily have both a source end and a sink end: They can also have two source ends or two sink ends.

  3. http://reo.project.cwi.nl.

  4. http://www.stringtemplate.org.

  5. To combat the state space explosion problem resulting from large numbers of \(\mathsf{{fifo}}\) s (which quickly makes code generation intractable otherwise), we apply an optimization technique called circuit splitting. Informally, this technique splits a circuit into subcircuits while ensuring that this splitting preserves the semantics of the original circuit. The splitting is done by (i) removing all the \(\mathsf{{fifo}}\)  channels, (ii) then generating code for the resulting unconnected subcircuits and the removed \(\mathsf{{fifo}}\)  channels individually (instead of for the whole circuit at once), and (iii) finally gluing all the generated code together. The basic principle underlying this technique is that \(\mathsf{{fifo}}\)  channels break synchrony: They naturally divide a circuit into independent subcircuits that execute synchronously, while communication between those subcircuits occurs only through asynchronous \(\mathsf{{fifo}}\)  channels. This means that different subcircuits do not need to communicate directly with each other and can proceed independently. See [19, 21, 30] for (formal) details.

    Fig. 3
    figure 3

    Architecture of CircCG  

    Full size image

  6. Recall from Sect. 3.2 that a ca implementation has a synchronization point for each boundary node occurring in one of its transitions.

  7. One can model stateless services with singleton automata.

  8. http://jax-ws.java.net.

  9. http://ws-i.org/Profiles/BasicProfile-1.2.html.

  10. http://w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#built-in-datatypes.

  11. Although we acknowledge that only few stateful ws providers publish machine-processable wsbss , we also observe that providers currently have only little incentive to do so, because none of the mainstream composition platforms exploit such (semi-)formal behavioral specifications, and it indeed seems to be a waste of effort to write and publish them. Only by developing composition platforms that use wsbss effectively, one may convince ws providers to publish such specifications. In anticipation of this, we are currently studying how to ease writing ca-based wsbss using a graphical interface.

  12. The gui implementation of OrchCG works slightly differently, mainly for reasons of user-friendliness: We wanted to support adding representations of wss directly to the Reo diagram containing the orchestrator circuit instead of forcing users to separate them into distinct files. While this changes the architecture of OrchCG a bit, it does not alter things from a conceptual perspective.

  13. At the time of writing, CalcService was hosted at http://mathertel.de/AJAXEngine/S01_AsyncSamples/CalcService.asmx by Matthias Hertel.

  14. Machine with Intel Q6600 quad core processor at 2.4 GHz and 8 gb of memory running Fedora Linux.

  15. All material used for running the tests reported on in this subsection, as well as the measurement data sets, are available at: http://reo.project.cwi.nl.

  16. All material necessary to reconstruct this case study, as well as the generated code, are available at: http://reo.project.cwi.nl.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centrum Wiskunde and Informatica, Science Park 123, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Sung-Shik T. Q. Jongmans, Francesco Santini & Farhad Arbab

  2. University of Amsterdam, Science Park 107, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Mahdi Sargolzaei & Hamideh Afsarmanesh

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  1. Sung-Shik T. Q. Jongmans
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  2. Francesco Santini
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  3. Mahdi Sargolzaei
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  4. Farhad Arbab
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  5. Hamideh Afsarmanesh
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Correspondence to Sung-Shik T. Q. Jongmans.

Additional information

On this paper, the work of the co-authors affiliated to the University of Amsterdam is partially supported by the FP7 project GLONET, funded by the European Commission.

This work was carried out during the second author’s tenure of the ERCIM “Alain Bensoussan” Fellowship Programme. This Programme is supported by the Marie Curie Co-funding of Regional, National and International Programmes (COFUND) of the European Commission.

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Jongmans, SS.T.Q., Santini, F., Sargolzaei, M. et al. Orchestrating web services using Reo: from circuits and behaviors to automatically generated code. SOCA 8, 277–297 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11761-013-0147-1

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