The Design And Implementation Of Service Flow Platform In JTang Application Server

Middleware technology, together with operating system and database, are listed as the Top Three System Software Technologies. Middleware vendor such as IBM, BEA and Oracle intensely competes with each other for the emerging J2EE Application Server technology. But J2EE is challenged by the interaction between heterogeneous systems. Web service, however, can solve that problem effectively, and warfare for Web Service over J2EE comes into being.With this trend, the development of JTang Application Server focuses on facilitating the information technology of Manufacturing, E-commerce, E-Government Affair and the usage of advanced technologies. JTang has the advantage of innovation and research accumulation, the Service Flow platform in JTang Application Server (JTangFlow-S) is one of our innovations.The targets of JTangFlow-S include the well support of web service in JTang and making customers benefit from the web service encapsulation of their system function and the business integration with their partners. With JTangFlow-S, JTang can be one of the J2EE Application Server products having the up to date web service technology, and service flow platform will be one of the key competitiveness of JTang.The main work of this paper is listed as below: depth analysis of technical standards of web service and service composition, and the impacts of these new technologies on the future development of application server;Mean while, doing research on the architecture and functional model of JTangFlow workflow system and JTang web service infrastructure on which are JTangFlow-S system based;Then the architecture of JTangFlow-S is introduced After introducing the architectural design, detailed design and implementation of Service Flow Designer subsystem and Service Flow Engine subsystem is explained from the perspectives of function spot, function model and key technologies. Especially, Petri Net is adopted in flow validation and emulation. JTangFlow-S' four major features are summarized: user-friendly flow designer interface, formal validation of service flow, semantic-based service registration and query, and dynamic binding of service.This work is supported by Zhejiang Province Key Software Development Foundation (No.2004C 11053).