BPEL is emerging as an open-standards language for Web service composition. However, its procedural style can lead to inflexible and tangled code for managing a crosscutting aspect -- synchronization constraints that define permissible sequences of execution for activities in a process. In this paper, we present DSCWeaver, a tool that enables a synchronization-aspect extension to BPEL. It uses DSCL, a synchronization expression language, to specify constraints. DSCL has the desirable features of declarative syntax, fine granularity, and validation support. A designer can use DSCL to describe and validate the synchronization behavior and rely on DSCWeaver to generate BPEL code. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach in a service deployment process and evaluate its performance using two metrics: Lines of Code (LoC) and Places to Visit (PtV). Evaluation results show that our approach can effectively reduce development effort of process designers while providing performance competi...
Qinyi Wu, Calton Pu, Akhil Sahai, Roger S. Barga