Welcome to ServiceInteraction.com

Reusable knowledge for web service design & implementation

This site is dedicated to documenting common problems and approaches (i.e. patterns) related to the design and implementation of web services, with a special emphasis on situations that arise when services engage in concurrent and interrelated interactions.
In addition to providing reusable knowledge, these patterns allow emerging web services design and implementation solutions to be benchmarked against abstracted forms of representative scenarios. For example, the collected patterns can be used to evaluate languages and platforms supporting contract-based service development and service composition such as WSDL, WS-BPEL, JBI, Indigo, etc.
The premise and motivation of this initiative is summarised by the following statement:

For service-oriented architectures to move forward, we need to shift from thinking in terms of request-response and buyer-seller-shipper interaction scenarios into addressing complex, large-scale, multi-party interactions in a systematic manner.

Accordingly, the patterns documented here go beyond simple bilateral interactions. They cover multilateral, competing, atomic, causally related, and routed interactions, as found in long-running business processes. The proposed solutions cover issues related to the implementation of these patterns using established and emerging web services standards and development frameworks. The focus of the patterns is on identifying principles, abstractions, and generic techniques. Code fragments are provided as part of the solutions but only for illustration purposes.