Extending BPEL for WSDL-Temporal based Web services

The BPEL specification focuses on business processes, the activities of which are assumed to be interactions with Web services. These multiple services are called composite Web service. WSDL is the W3C specification for developing a Web service. However, change in the business requirements over a period of time result in multiple versions of Web services. Maintaining multiple versions is difficult especially for organizations, with established products and a large customer base. The problem aggregates further when these Web services are bundled into a business process. In our earlier work, we have extended WSDL to WSDL-Temporal (WSDL-T) that eases the management of various versions of a Web service. WSDL-T allows access to a particular version of an operation of a Web service from the client. But, existing specifications of the Bussiness Process Execution Language (BPEL) does not support the new artifacts proposed in the WSDL-T. In the presented work, the BPEL specifications are extended to BPEL-Temporal. BPEL-Temporal has introduced a new artifact that allows accessing a particular version of an operation from the bunch of available versions within a single Web service. BPEL-Temporal enables the BPEL processes to call a new or old version of the constituent Web service dynamically. The BPEL-T helps in easy and better management of business processes.