Hasso-Plattner-Institut25 Jahre HPI
Hasso-Plattner-Institut25 Jahre HPI
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Adriatik Nikaj

RESTful Choreographies

Business process management has become a key instrument to organize work as many companies represent their operations in business process models. Recently, business process choreography diagrams have been introduced as part of the Business Process Model and Notation standard to represent interactions between business processes, run by different partners. When it comes to the interactions between services on the Web, Representational State 'Transfer (REST) is one of the primary architectural styles employed by web services today. Ideally, the RESTful interactions between participants should implement the interac-tions defined at the business choreography level. The problem, however, is the conceptual gap between the business process choreography diagrams and R.ESTful interactions. Choreography diagrams, on the one hand, are modeled from business domain experts with the purpose of capturing, communicating and, ideally, driving the business interactions. RESTful interactions, on the other hand, depend on RESTful interfaces that are designed by web engineers with the purpose of facilitating the interaction between participants on the internet. In most cases however, business domain experts are unaware of the technology behind web service interfaces and web en-gineers tend to overlook the overall business goals of web services. While there is considerable work on using process models during process implementation, there is little work on using choreography models to implement interactions between business processes. This thesis addresses this research gap by raising the following research question: How to close the conceptual gap between business process choreographies and RESTful interactions? This thesis offers several research contributions that jointly answer the research question. The main research contribution is the design of a language that captures RESTful interactions between participants—RESTful choreography modeling language. Formal completeness properties (with respect to REST) are introduced to validate its instances, called RESTful choreographies. A systematic semi-automatic method for deriving RESTful choreographies from business pro-cess choreographies is proposed. The method employs natural language process-ing techniques to translate business interactions into RESTful interactions. The effectiveness of the approach is shown by developing a prototypical tool that evaluates the derivation method over a large number of choreography models. In addition, the thesis proposes solutions towards implementing R.ESTful choreographies. In particular, two RESTful service specifications are introduced for aiding, respectively, the execution of choreographies' exclusive gateways and the guidance of R.ESTful interactions.