Integrating Service Composition Flow with User Interactions

Abstract

Web service technologies are best exploited by composing services, and BPEL (Web Services Business Process Execution Language) is adopted industrial-wide as the defacto service composition standard. However, BPEL is applied mainly in the design of composite services and fully automated processes, and user interaction, that should be included in service delivery, but presently is not included in the BPEL standard. To integrate the composite service flow with user interactions, in this work we propose a framework to extend BPEL to new activities that describe user involvement and user interfaces. An enhanced BPEL engine with a UI rendering engine was accordingly developed.