Collaborative Architecture for Web Services

Abstract

Web services are one of the emerging technologies in the Enterprise application development due to its heterogeneity. A new architectural pattern implemented for Web services called Collaborative Architecture, where the workflows of business logic are distributed among the participating web services. This architecture can be thought of as opposite to the behavior of Service Oriented Architecture, where in SOA services are orchestrated and workflows are defined in a central place. The Service Oriented Architecture and other Service orchestration frame works control the workflow process by residing at a single location. Any change in behavior of particular participant web services will affect the entire workflow and then the final output, this lead to re-work on the central place whether it is in the core of SOA or BPEL. These days business organization wish to develop their system and expose the system as web services and they tend to change their business policy over time due to the demand from their consumers and other competitors. When a system consumes that services and orchestrate for achieve any business goals with the architecture style of Service Oriented Architecture or using any other styles such as BPEL would require introducing the change in the centralized place done by the service provider. The business logic and workflow in collaborative architecture can be defined locally along with each web services such as declaratively in xml file. One key difference that proposed is the Distribution of Control, currently the processing is distributed but often in large scale systems the control is still centralized using Orchestration and respective workflows. With the distribution of control to each web services, web services would get some kind of autonomy and participating (a role) in workflow to complete the task. The proposed collaborative architecture for web services is more suitable for some business scenarios where there are many web services participating and the workflows of business logic are very complex and dynamic. This complexity can be dealt as mentioned earlier through distributing complex workflow into relevant web services. In this scenario as a requirement of business, if the collaborative architecture requires the participation of new service it can easily be introduced that new service along with its workflow