Towards fault tolerance in web services compositions

ABSTRACT

Many businesses are now moving towards the use of composite web services that are based on a collection of web services working together to achieve an objective. Although they are becoming business-critical elements, current development support tools do not provide a practical way to include fault tolerance characteristics in web services compositions. This paper proposes a mechanism that allows programmers to easily develop fault tolerant compositions using diverse web services. The mechanism allows programmers to specify alternative web services for each operation and offers a set of artifacts that simplify the coding process, by automatically dealing with all the aspects related to the redundant web services invocation and responses voting. The mechanism is also able to perform a continuous evaluation of the services based on their behavior during operation. The approach is illustrated using compositions based on web services publicly available in the Internet and on the web services specified by the standard TPC-App performance benchmark.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.3 Coding Tools and Techniques

General Terms:
Experimentation, Measurement, Performance, Reliability

Keywords:
composition, diversity, fault tolerance, web services