Synthy: A Service Creation Environment based on End to End Composition of Web Services (With application to Mobile Service Providers)

Summary Businesses today face a significant challenge in quickly de- livering new applications in response to changing condi- tions. Application development is often done in an ad hoc manner, without standard frameworks or libraries, thus re- sulting in poor reuse of software assets. Web services have received much interest in industry due to their potential in facilitating seamless business-to-business or enterprise ap- plication integration. A web services composition tool can help automate the process, from creating business process functionality, to developing executable workflows, to de- ploying them on an execution environment. However, we find that the main approaches taken thus far to standardize and compose web services are piecemeal and insufficient. The business world has adopted a (distributed) programming approach in which web service instances are described using WSDL, composed into flows with a language like BPEL and invoked with the SOAP protocol. They have focused on the execution aspects of composite web services, without much consideration for requirements capture and the development process. Academia has propounded the AI approach of for- mally representing web service capabilities in ontologies, and reasoning about their composition using goal-oriented inferencing techniques from planning. It has stressed on the feasibility of service composition based on semantic de- scriptions of service capabilities, but its output cannot be di- rectly handed off to a runtime environment for deployment. We present the first integrated work in composing web ser- vices end to end from specification to deployment by syner- gistically combining the strengths of the above approaches. We describe a prototype service creation environment and demonstrate how it can significantly speed up the time-to- market for new services.