| In this thesis, we review different approaches to implement analyses for the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS)---a language initially proposed by BEA, IBM and Microsoft to describe business process behaviour based on web services. Analyses of a BPEL4WS program often boil down to walking the abstract syntax tree of the program. We exploit the Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF) to generate a hierarchy of Java classes and interfaces that represents the abstract syntax of BPEL4WS. We review, refine and extend a technique, based on Java's reflection mechanism and introduced by Palsberg and Jay [44], to walk such trees. Such a walker provides us a powerful approach to analyze BPEL4WS programs. Unfortunately, since the walker relies on Java's reflection mechanism, its performance is rather poor. A significant part of our research has focused on improving its performance. We propose preprocessing the code that performs an analysis to generate new and more efficient code for it. Our approach inherits most of the benefits of using the walker to implement analyses of BPEL4WS and gives rise to improved performance. However, the fact that the code needs to be compiled again every time the EMF model of BPEL4WS changes is its main drawback. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
