Abstract
The use of web services technology is becoming more widespread with many businesses wishing to provide services to their clients over the Internet. Although web services technology is currently the best method for providing services remotely over the Internet it does not provide any concept of state or any way to model workflow. This has resulted in new specifications to deal with these issues, namely WSRF and BPEL4WS.
In order to effectively model certain types of workflow, such as that of the Chem-Search laboratory, there needs to be a method for integrating BPEL4WS and WSRF, so that stateful workflow can be modelled.
This research proposed a method of integration using a proxy service to enable BPEL4WS to support WSRF that was evaluated by modelling the workflow of the laboratory.
The results showed that the method enabled BPEL4WS to work with WSRF and provided a mechanism that ensured a client always had a valid endpoint reference to the WSRF web service.
This research also raised some problems with the specifications and tools used to implement this method that would need to be resolved to ensure the widespread adoption and standardisation of these specifications.