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Publication date: 1 de June, 2021

28th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Special track on Service-Oriented Architectures and Programming

Service-Oriented Programming (SOP) is quickly changing our vision of the Web, bringing a paradigmatic shift in the methodologies followed by programmers when designing and implementing distributed systems. Originally, the Web was mainly seen as a means of presenting information to a wide spectrum of people, but SOP is triggering a radical transformation of the Web towards a computational fabric where loosely coupled services interact publishing their interfaces inside dedicated repositories, where they can be discovered by other services and then invoked, abstracting from their actual implementation. Research on SOP is giving strong impetus to the development of new technologies and tools for creating and deploying distributed software. In the context of this modern paradigm we have to cope with an old challenge, like in the early days of Object-Oriented Programming when, until key features like encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism, and proper design methodologies were defined, consistency in the programming model definition was not achieved. The complex scenario of SOP needs to be clarified on many aspects, both from the engineering and from the foundational points of view.

From the engineering point of view, there are open issues at many levels. Among others, at the system design level, both traditional approaches based on UML and approaches taking inspiration from business process modelling, e.g. BPMN, are used. At the composition level, although WS-BPEL is a de-facto industrial standard, other approaches are appearing, and both the orchestration and choreography views have their supporters. At the description and discovery level there are two separate communities pushing respectively the semantic approach (ontologies, OWL, …) and the syntactic one (WSDL, …). In particular, the role of discovery engines and protocols is not clear. In this respect we still lack adopted standards: UDDI looked to be a good candidate, but it is no longer pushed by the main corporations, and its wide adoption seems difficult. Furthermore, a new implementation platform, the so-called REST services, is emerging and competing with classic Web Services. Finally, features like Quality of Service, security and dependability need to be taken seriously into account, and this investigation should lead to standard proposals.

From the foundational point of view, formalists have discussed widely in the last years, and many attempts to use formal methods for specification and verification in this setting have been made. Session correlation, service types, contract theories and communication patterns are only a few examples of the aspects that have been investigated. Moreover, several formal models based upon automata, Petri nets and algebraic approaches have been developed. However most of these approaches concentrate only on a few features of Service-Oriented Systems in isolation, and a comprehensive approach is still far from being achieved.

The Service-Oriented Architectures and Programming track aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners having the common objective of transforming SOP into a mature discipline with both solid scientific foundations and mature software engineering development methodologies supported by dedicated tools. In particular, we will encourage works and discussions about what SOP still needs in order to achieve its original goal.

Major topics of interest will include:

Formal methods for specification of Web Services
Notations and models for Service-Oriented Computing
Methodologies and tools for Service-Oriented application design
Service-Oriented Middlewares
Service-Oriented Programming languages
Test methodologies for Service-Oriented applications
Analysis techniques and tools
Service systems performance analysis
Industrial deployment of tools and methodologies
Standards for Service-Oriented Programming
Service application case studies
Dependability and Web Services
Quality of Service
Security issues in Service-Oriented Computing
Comparisons between different approaches to Services
Exception handling in composition languages
Trust and Web Services
Sustainability and Web Services, Green Computing
Adaptable Web Services
Software Product Lines for Services
Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Service-Oriented Computing

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