Thrift Service Composition: Toward Extending BPEL

Today, there are more than 7 billion connected devices including resource-constrained devices which are capable of participating in service collaborations. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is prominent as a result of loose coupling and platform independence, not to mention the business-IT alignment of service-oriented solutions. Also, loose coupling and platform independence match mobile device connection intermittence and platform diversity, respectively. Concerns about implementation arise as a result of the resource constraints of mobile devices. Besides, service composition plays a crucial role in the achievement of business-IT alignment by service-oriented solutions that need to be concerned. The most common implementation of a SOA service is the SOAP web service, which is supported by several service composition standards and tools such as WS-BPEL, WS-CDL, BPML, ebXML, OWL-S and WSMF, but suffers from SOAP verboseness and text serialization/deserialization overheads. SOAP computational and communicational overheads make SOAP inefficient for service collaborations of mobile devices which have resource constraints and experience connection intermittences. In contrast with the SOAP web service, Thrift service is a computationally efficient binary implementation for SOA services. Thrift services benefit greatly from binary serialization/deserialization, they lack sufficient standards and tools for service composition to achieve business-IT alignment. This study proposes an architecture to provide service composition capabilities for thrift services, so that the architecture enables users to either combine Thrift services as a composite Thrift service and to invoke the resultant Thrift services directly from BPEL or to orchestrate Thrift services and SOAP web services together and to invoke the resultant service in the same way. The initial implementation was promising and is discussed in this paper.