Method, system, and program for generating a program capable of invoking a flow of operations

#1. Field of the Invention

#The present invention relates to a method, system, and program for generating a program capable of invoking a flow of operations

#2. Description of the Related Art

#Referring now to the drawings in which like reference numbers represent corresponding parts throughout:

#FIG. 1 depicts a services-oriented architecture;

#FIG. 2 represents a web service invocation or response transferred as a wrapped XML message between a service provider and a service requestor;

#In the following description, reference is made to the accompanying drawings which form a part hereof and which illustrate several embodiments of the present invention. It is understood that other embodiments may be utilized and structural and operational changes may be made without departing from the scope of the present invention.

#The nature of Web services make them natural components in a service-oriented architecture. A typical service-oriented architecture is shown in FIG. 1. Service providers 11 host a network accessible software module. A service provider defines a service description for a Web service and publishes it to a service registry 15, as depicted by arrow 17. A service requester 13 at a client computer uses a find operation, represented by arrow 19, to retrieve the service description from the registry 13 and uses the service description to bind with the service provider, as represented by connector 21, and to invoke or interact with the Web service implementation. To facilitate this architecture, the client is connected to a router (not shown) at the service provider's server. Preferably, the connection between the client computer and the router is established via the Internet, but other connections can be used. It can be appreciated that the client computer connects to the Internet via telephone modem, cable modem, LAN, WAN, T1 or any other means well known in the art.

#Applying the preceding model to web services and referring to FIG. 2, a service provider 11 makes an application available over the web as a Web service by wrapping the application in such a way that it can be accessed using standard XML messages, i.e., application-specific messages 31 are sent in standard XML document formats conforming to the corresponding service description. The XML messages 31 are themselves placed in a wrapper 33 in such a way that masks the underlying transport protocol. For example, an application message is placed in an XML wrapper by an XML extender administrative servlet (DXX admin servlet, not shown) included in the router at the service provider's database 29. XML messages 31 are then wrapped in Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) envelopes 33 at SOAP server 27 and posted to the web via HTTP server 25.