Web Service Orchestration and Choreography: Enabling Business Processes on the Web

Abstract

The Web service domain is a fast growing and fast changing environment. From a business perspective, the trend over the last few years in the Web services area firmly points toward seamless business logic integration and inter-enterprise collaboration. However, in order to accomplish such goals, both technological and conceptual advances are required. Some already have proven their viability, others still have to be made. Among them, Web service orchestration and choreography are of crucial importance, but still lack a widely agreed on development framework comprising both technological and conceptual aspects. In this paper we try to provide a critical snapshot of current standards for Web service development and particularly we focus on Web service orchestration and choreography. We discuss problems and solutions from a conceptual point of view, exemplify the illustrated ideas by means of real-world technologies and standards and highlight the mutual dependencies that exist among orchestration and choreography of Web services.