Model-Driven Development of Service Compositions

The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) aims at enabling the usage of high abstraction levels when orchestrating Web Services to represent business processes. While this has partly been achieved, several tasks required for the creation of a BPEL process demand cumbersome implementation of technical details, adding little value for the actual business process. Real-world tool-support still fails to shield users from these deficiencies. Instead of just modeling the intended process, developers regularly need to perform low-level tasks such as creating and copying variables or translating between different data models. Apart from these BPEL-specific burdens, process modelers get distracted by the repetitive creation of standard Web Services that should be a commodity today — e.g. the persistence and the retrieval of business objects. To address these problems, this thesis proposes a modeling notation, an accompanying modeling tool and a generator, ultimately producing a BPEL orchestration and Web Services generated from a process model that was created using the modeling tool. It tries to move the act of orchestration more in line with the goal of using high-level abstractions in proximity to the respective domain.