JOLIE: a Java Orchestration Language Interpreter Engine

Abstract

Service oriented computing is an emerging paradigm for programming distributed applications based on services. Services are simple software elements that supply their functionalities by exhibiting their interfaces and that can be invoked by exploiting simple communication primitives. The emerging mechanism exploited in service oriented computing for composing services –in order to provide more complex functionalities– is by means of orchestrators. An orchestrator is able to invoke and coordinate other services by exploiting typical workflow patterns such as parallel composition, sequencing and choices. Examples of orchestration languages are XLANG [IBM, “XLANG: Web Services for Business Process Design,” http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/xml_wsspecs/xlang-c/default.htm] and WS-BPEL [OASIS, “Web Services Business Process Execution Language Version 2.0, Working Draft,” http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/10347/wsbpel-specification-draft-120204.htm]. In this paper we present JOLIE, an interpreter and engine for orchestration programs. The main novelties of JOLIE are that it provides an easy to use development environment (because it supports a more programmer friendly C/Java-like syntax instead of an XML-based syntax) and it is based on a solid mathematical underlying model (developed in previous works of the authors [N. Busi, R. Gorrieri, C. Guidi, R. Lucchi and G. Zavattaro, Towards a formal framework for Choreography, in: Proc. of 3rd International Workshop on Distributed and Mobile Collaboration (DMC 2005) (2005), N. Busi, R. Gorrieri, C. Guidi, R. Lucchi and G. Zavattaro, Choreography and orchestration conformance for system design, in: Proc. of 8th International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages (COORDINATION'06), LNCS to appear, 2006, C. Guidi and R. Lucchi, Mobility mechanisms in service oriented computing, in: Proc. of 8th International Conference on on Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems (FMOODS'06), LNCS to appear, 2006]).