Exception resolution for BPEL processes: a middleware-based framework and performance evaluation

ABSTRACT

WS-BPEL is widely used nowadays for specifying and executing composite business processes within the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). During the execution however, of such business processes, a number of faults stemming from the nature of SOA (e.g. network or server failures) may occur. The WS-BPEL scenario designer must therefore use the provisions offered by WS-BPEL to catch these exceptions and resolve them, usually by invoking some equivalent web service that is expected to be reachable and available. System fault handler specification is though an additional task for the WS scenario designer, while the presence of such handlers within the scenario necessitates extra maintenance activities, as new alternate services emerge or some of the specified ones are withdrawn. In this paper, we propose a middleware-based framework for system exception resolution, which undertakes the tasks of failure interception, discovery of alternate services and their invocation. The middleware is deployed and maintained independently of the WS-BPEL scenarios, removing thus the need for specifying and maintaining system fault handlers within the scenarios. We also present performance measures, establishing that the overhead imposed by the addition of the proposed middleware layer is minimal.

REFERENCES

• 1: Leymann, F., Roller, D., and Schmidt, M.-T. 2002. Web services and business process management, IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 41, 198 No2.
• 2: Eric Newcomer , Greg Lomow, Understanding SOA with Web Services (Independent Technology Guides), Addison-Wesley Professional, 2004
• 3: Chrysanthos Dellarocas , Mark Klein, A knowledge-based approach for handling exceptions in business processes, Information Technology and Management, v.1 n.3, p.155-169, 2000 [doi>10.1023/A:1019116823502]
• 4: ActiveVOS, 2008. Active Endpoints presentation, http://www.activevos.com/index.php
• 5: Oracle Corporation, 2008. Oracle BPEL Process Manager, http://www.oracle.com/technology/bpel/
• 6: The Eclipse BPEL Team, 2008. The Eclipse BPEL Project, http://www.eclipse.org/bpel/
• 7: Java.Net, 2008. Open ESB, https://open-esb.dev.java.net/
• 8: Glen Dobson, Using WS-BPEL to Implement Software Fault Tolerance for Web Services, Proceedings of the 32nd EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, p.126-133, August 29-September 01, 2006 [doi>10.1109/EUROMICRO.2006.63]
• 9: Kareliotis C., Vassilakis C., Georgiadis P., 2006. Towards Dynamic, Relevance-Driven Exception Resolution in Composite Web Services, 4th International Workshop on SOA & Web Services Best Practices, Portland, Oregon, USA at OOPSLA.
• 10: Kareliotis C., Vassilakis C., Georgiadis P., 2007. Enhancing BPEL scenarios with Dynamic Relevance-Based Exception Handling, Proceedings of the IEEE 2007 International Conference on Web Services (ICWS).
• 11: CA Willy Technology, 2007. SOA and Web Services -- The Performance Paradox, http://www.ca.com/us/whitepapers/collateral.aspx?cid=147947
• 12: Kochut, K. J., 1999. METEOR Model version 3. Athens, GA, Large Scale Distributed Information Systems Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Georgia.
• 13: Kunal Verma , Kaarthik Sivashanmugam , Amit Sheth , Abhijit Patil , Swapna Oundhakar , John Miller, METEOR-S WSDI: A Scalable P2P Infrastructure of Registries for Semantic Publication and Discovery of Web Services, Information Technology and Management, v.6 n.1, p.17-39, January 2005 [doi>10.1007/s10799-004-7773-4]
• 14: Cimpian, E., Moran, M., Oren, E., Vitvar, T., Zaremba, M., 2005. Overview and Scope of WSMX. Technical report, WSMX Working Draft, http://www.wsmo.org/TR/d13/d13.0/v0.2/
• 15: Feier, C., Roman, D., Polleres, A. Domingue, J., Stollberg, M., Fensel, D. (2005). Towards Intelligent Web Services: Web Service Modeling Ontology, In Proc. of the International Conf on Intelligent Computing (2005)
• 16: Angelov D. et al., 2007. WSDL 1.1 Binding Extension for SOAP 1.2, http://www.w3.org/Submission/wsdl11soap 12/#faultelement
• 17: Wessels, D., 2001. Interception Proxying and Caching, in Web Caching, O'Reilly, ISBN: 1-56592-536-X.
• 18: Al-Masri, E., 2008. The QWS Dataset, http://www.uoguelph.ca/~qmahmoud/qws/index.html
• 19: NetBeans Project, 2008. Netbeans IDE http://www.netbeans.org/
• 20: JBI Team, 2008. Java Business Integration, https://openesb.dev.java.net/Components.html
• 21: Glassfish Team, 2008. Glassfish Open Source Application Server https://glassfish.dev.java.net/
• 22: Apache foundation, 2007. ab Apache Open Source benchmarking tool. http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html
• 23: OASIS, 2007. OASIS Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL) TC. http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wsbpel/

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.4 Systems and Software
          Subjects: Distributed systems

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.8 Metrics
          Subjects: Performance measures

  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services
          Subjects: Web-based services

General Terms:
Design, Measurement, Performance, Reliability

Keywords:
exception handling, middleware, performance metrics, quality of service (QoS), scalability, web services