An Approach to Checking Compatibility of Service Contracts in Service-Oriented Applications

In the service-oriented architecture model, a service may be characterized by its exchange of asynchronous messages, and a service contract is a desirable composition of a variety of messages. Though this model is simple, implementing large-scale, cross-organizational distributed applications may be difficult to achieve in general, as there is no guarantee that service composition will be possible because of incompatibilities between the service contracts. This article examines and addresses this problem, first by identifying and specifying contract compatibility conditions based on standards such as WS-BusinessActivity, and second, through the use of a compatibility checking tool that enables application developers to perform checks at design time. [Article copies are available for purchase from InfoSci-on-Demand.com]