Abstract

Abstract. An important architectural style for constructing enterprise applications is to use transactional workflows in SOA. In this setting, workflow activities invoke distributed services in a coordinated manner, using transaction context-propagating messages, coordination protocols, and compensation logic. Designing such transactional workflows is a time-consuming and error-prone task requiring deep subject matter expertise. Aiming to alleviate this problem, we introduce a new analysis and design method that (a) identifies recurring architectural decisions in analysis-level process models, (b) models alternatives for these decisions as reusable, platform-independent patterns and primitives, and (c) maps the patterns and primitives into technology- and platform-specific settings in BPEL and SCA. Our method accelerates the identification of decisions, empowers process modelers to make informed decisions, and automates the enforcement of the decisions in deployment artifacts; tool support is available. We demonstrate value and feasibility of our method in an industry case study.

Citations