Web Services Outsourcing Manager

A framework that enables dynamic composition of Web service flow based on customer requirements.

Date Posted: September 30, 2002

Overview Requirements Download FAQs Forum Reviews 1. Why do we need dynamic Web service composition? 2. How does WSOM capture customers' requirements? 3. What's the difference between WSOM Web Edition and Eclipse Edition? 4. What's the advantage of WSOM? 5. What's the relationship between WSOM and Web Services Tool Kit (WSTK)? 6. How does WSOM relate to BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services)? 7. What's the limitation of the current release of WSOM? 1. Why do we need dynamic Web service composition? A business process includes many "stateful," long-running interactions involving two or more parties. Creating business processes on demand is important for meeting changing customer requirements. Companies offering new business processes composed by Web Services could tap new revenue streams by selling valuable data through a Web service to partners and subscribers. This type of valuable information "outsourcing" is a direct and effective way in which an organization can control costs, improve profits, and enhance overall responsiveness to changing market dynamics. Integration of Web services fosters collaboration with heterogeneous business services and opens the door for new business opportunities. The challenge in composing business processes is to provide quick, easy, secure, and inexpensive integration with the existing business processes and Web services used by partners. Selection and composition of services in a drag-and-drop manner is time-consuming manual labor. Dynamically composing the flow of Web services via discovery and selection instead of manual coding is imperative for developers. Web Services Outsourcing Manager (WSOM) solves this problem. Back to top 2. How does WSOM capture customers' requirements? WSOM framework provides two mechanisms for capturing the business requirements from the customers, namely, tools for GUI-based capturing and program-based converters for annotation of requirements. In this technology preview, only two types of GUIs are provided: a Java application running on an Eclipse platform and WSOM Web Edition. These provide a set of interactive interfaces for capturing customers’ work flows, preferences, constraints, and business rules, and they automatically generate a requirement annotation document. Back to top 3. What's the difference between WSOM Web Edition and Eclipse Edition? WSOM Web Edition and WSOM Eclipse Edition are two types of applications of WSOM released in this technology preview. They provide different user interfaces but share the same WSOM engine. WSOM Web Edition is a simple Web portal for business process composition using existing Web services. On the other hand, WSOM Eclipse Edition provides a Java application running on any Eclipse platform (such as IBM WebSphere Studio Workbench or WebSphere Studio Application Developer) for capturing requirements and configuring an optimal business process that matches customers' requirements. Back to top 4. What's the advantage of WSOM? The purpose of WSOM is to fully automate the end-to-end composition of business processes by using existing Web services. WSOM bridges the gap between the informal, subjective customer requirements and the objective, machine-readable flow language, such as BPEL4WS, WSFL, and XLANG. WSOM automates the generation of scripts for searching for Web services; and it automates the process of selecting Web services by using a "pluggable" optimization framework. WSOM also monitors and tunes the composed business process so that it adapts to the new requirements at run time. Back to top 5. What's the relationship between WSOM and Web Services Tool Kit (WSTK)? The IBM Web Services Tool Kit for dynamic e-business (WSTK) provides a run-time environment, as well as demos, examples, and additional tools for designing and executing Web Service applications. It can be used for creating and discovering individual Web services, which could be used by WSOM to create a composite Web service (that is, a flow of Web services) in order to satisfy customer requirements. Back to top 6. How does WSOM relate to BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services)? WSOM provides a suite of tools for capturing customer requirements, which could be partially represented in BPEL4WS at abstraction level. Then WSOM binds a set of real Web services to the conceptual Web services that were defined in the business process template to match customer requirements. As a result, the business process constructed by WSOM could be adapted to different Web service flow languages, such as WSFL, BPEL4WS, and so forth. The adaptor in WSOM generates only WSFL in this technology preview; it will support BPEL4WS in the future releases. Back to top 7. What's the limitation of the current release of WSOM? This initial release demonstrates only the feasibility of dynamic composition of a business process using existing Web services. In this release, we used an XML-based annotation document to capture customer requirements and preferences in a uniformed manner. In the future, BPEL4WS will represent partial requirements. In addition, the dynamic search on UDDI registries has been hidden in this technology preview for portability and simplicity. But the advanced Web service discovery engine (Business Explorer for Web Services (BE4WS)) in WSOM is included in WSTK, which is currently available here at alphaWorks. The complete framework package, including the APIs and support of BPEL4WS, will be included in the next release. If you are interested in licensing this enabling technology for dynamic composition of Web services, please e-mail us here or e-mail alphaWorks. Back to top