On Composition of SOAP Based and RESTful Services

Many online businesses expose their technological product and service offerings as web services. To offer the desired functionality, often a number of simple web services need to be combined to create a composite web service. Traditionally, services were implemented as SOAP based services. However, RESTful services are now becoming more popular. Thus, there is a large pool of services available to users for inclusion in a composite service. The BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) has been in use for creation of complex services as per the workflow. At present, the BPEL standard does not support inclusion of RESTful web services in the business process. This prevents inclusion of many useful services in a complex business use case where lots of web services are required in order to achieve desired functionality. In this paper, a method RESO Co has been proposed that enables the conventional BPEL engine to consume SOAP based as well as RESTful services in composition. The presented method thus helps in increasing the number of services available for composition while also preserving the advantage of lightweight nature of RESTful services.