The Application of Web Services within a Business Process Framework

This project is an investigation into the readiness of web service standards to be applied to business processes. Web services are based on the open standards of Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), Web Service Description Language (WSDL), and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and are now becoming more and more commercially available. This is shown by their inclusion in products by Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM. Further standards, such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), WS-Inspection, and WS-Addressing are still relatively new. BPEL is of particular interest to businesses as it allows the definition of business processes. This paper presents observations from using Microsoft .NET to develop a BPEL engine. Using this research it further discusses how BPEL and the other web service technologies fit together and proposes a set of business scenarios that should be considered as part of the technology development. Additionally, issues with selecting web services and describing business processes are discussed by using technologies developed for the Semantic Web. The research concludes that the web service technology needs further time to mature if businesses are to deploy web services as part of a business process framework with minimal development effort