Middleware Services for Web Service Compositions

WS-* specifications cover a variety of issues ranging from security and reliability to transaction support in web services. However, these specifications do not address web service compositions. On the other hand, BPEL as the future standard web service composition language allows the specification of the functional part of the composition as a business process but it fails short in expressing non-functional properties such as security, reliability and persistence. In this paper, we propose an approach for the transparent integration of technical concerns in web service compositions. Our approach is driven by the analogy between web services and software components and is inspired from server-side component models such as Enterprise Java Beans. The main components of our framework are the process container,the middleware services and the deployment descriptor