A declarative language to support dynamic evolution of web service business protocols

We investigate the problem of web service instances migration in the context of business protocol evolution, i.e., how to convert active instances of web services from an old version of a business protocol into a new one? We propose a framework based on a declarative approach to support service providers in defining fine-grained migration strategies of active instances. While the existing approaches for instances migration force the migrated instances to reflect the original ones as accurately as possible, in our approach we give to service providers the ability to declaratively define the constraints that drive the instances migration process. A migration strategy is expressed as a set of instances migration rules which are specified using an instance mapping language made of a set of generic migration patterns. The proposed approach has been implemented in a software tool that provides useful functionalities for protocol managers. © 2016, Springer-Verlag London.