Will Reliability Kill the Web Service Composition?

Web service composition is a distributed model to construct new web service on top of existing primitive or other composite web services. The advantage of web service composition has already been demonstrated and highlighted for its capability to compose autonomous services to achieve new functionality. However, an important question is whether this distributed model will be realized or not, due to the reliability problem of composite web services. We take the position that the trend of web service composition will not be terminated because of the reliability problem. We defend the position by arguing that the reliability of both constituent web services and web service composition itself would be greatly improved due to the emergence of research providing cost-effective solutions. More interestingly, we show that web service composition could even achieve much higher reliability by leveraging the redundancy intrinsic to the Web. As the conclusion, we believe that the high reliability can be achieved by the support of existing solutions and ongoing research efforts. And the reliability problem will forward rather than reverse the growth of composite web services. More and more autonomous web service would be composed to provide different services to address the wide range of demands.