Developing adapters for web services integration

The push toward business process automation has generated the need for integrating different enterprise applications involved in such processes. The typical approach to integration and to process automation is based on the use of adapters and message brokers. The need for adapters in Web services mainly comes from two sources: one is the heterogeneity at the higher levels of the interoperability stack, and the other is the high number of clients, each of which can support different interfaces and protocols, thereby generating the need for providing multiple interfaces to the same service. In this paper, we characterize the problem of adaptation of web services by identifying and classifying different kinds of adaptation requirements. Then, we focus on business protocol adapters, and we classify the different ways in which two protocols may differ. Next, we propose a methodology for developing adapters in Web services, based on the use of mismatch patterns and service composition technologies.