Integration of Business Event and Rule Management with the Web Services Model

Web services technology is emerging as a promising infrastructure to support loosely coupled, Internet-based applications that are distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic. It provides a standards-based, process-centric framework for achieving the sharing of distributed heterogeneous applications. While Web services technology provides a promising foundation for developing distributed applications for e-business, additional features are required to make this paradigm truly useful in the real world. In particular, interactions among business organizations need to follow the policies, regulations, security and other business rules of the organizations. An effective way to control, restrict and enforce business rules in the use of Web services is to integrate business event and rule management concepts and techniques into the Web services model. In this paper, we focus on incorporating the business event and rule-management concepts into the Web services model at the service provider side. Based on a code-generation approach, we have developed techniques and implemented tools to generate Web service “wrappers” and other objects required to integrate an Event-Trigger-Rule (ETR) technology with the Web services technology.