Experiences from building a WS–Agreement document analyzer tool (Including use cases in WS–Agreement and WSAg4People) v1.0 : Technical Report ISA-10-TR-03

Abstract

The WS–Agreement specification has gained a wide acceptance in the web services community as a means for establishing service level agreements between service providers and consumers. Although there are some implemen8 tations of the WS–Agreement protocol, the lack of user–friendly tools for the edition and analysis of WS–Agreement documents is still a problem. In this paper, we present some experiences gained during the design and implementation of the ADA framework and the WSAg4People language. On the one hand, ADA is a framework for the automated analysis of WS–Agreement documents, including the detection and explanation of conflicts, which can be used through a web service API and a web–based user interface. On the other hand, the WSAg4People language is a plain–text language equivalent to the XML–based language proposed in the WS–Agreement specification, which is much easier to read and write for human users than its XML–based counterpart. During our work, we have had to make decisions about the variability points inWS–Agreement and we have also identified potential enhancements to the current specification that could be of interest for the WS–Agreement practitioners in particular and for the web services community in general