Building Business Processes or Assembling Service Components: Reuse Services with BPEL4WS and SCA

The service-oriented architecture (SOA) has attracted lots of attentions these days. However, SOA is essentially a design methodology that has existed for decades, and doesn't provide enough details about the development, reuse and integration of the services. The Business Process Execution Language for Web services (BPEL4WS) has offered a formal specification for integrating loosely coupled services and building flexible business processes. And the newly emerging service component architecture (SCA) provides a set of specifications which describe a model for implementing SCA service components and assembling existing services. Despite the differences in their mechanisms for reusing and integrating services in SOA, they complement each other in nature. In this paper, we present in-depth discussions about their features, and combine them to achieve useful service reuse patterns for building non-trivial applications in SOA