ABSTRACTING AND ENFORCING WEB SERVICE PROTOCOLS.

Web services are emerging as a promising technology for the automation of inter-organizational interactions. As technology matures and the foundations of Web services become more solid, users will start to demand tools that facilitate the service development lifecycle. It is only when such tools become available that novel technologies become applied and enter the mainstream, since the complexity, cost and time necessary to deploy and manage solutions is dramatically reduced. In this paper, we present a framework and a tool that support the model-driven development of Web services. The idea consists in identifying key Web services abstractions, in addition to those of basic Web services standards, that enable the description of service policies and properties that are useful in practice. In this paper, we focus on service protocols, and specifically on conversation and trust negotiation protocols. These protocols are modeled by means of graphical tools and high-level languages so that they are easy to specify, understand, and evolve. The tools also support the automatic generation of service implementation skeletons based on these abstractions, manage the entire service lifecycle, and provide run-time support to verify that the interaction among clients and services occur in compliance with the specified policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]