Programming service oriented applications

Service Oriented Computing (SOC) plays a fundamental role for designing interoperable applications distributed over the network. Althought most of the programming aspects have been defined and standardized, a definition of the core features that development and execution frameworks have to support is still missing. In this paper we propose SOCK as a means for formalizing the basic programming aspects of service oriented applications. SOCK is supposed to provide a structured categorization of service features that permits either the separation of design concerns and the study of services behavior and interoperability issues thus enabling the development of fully fledged services networks. 1. Research partially funded by EU Integrated Project Sensoria, contract n. 016004. Some preliminary results reported in this paper appeared in [GLG06] 2. Department of Computer Science, University of Bologna 3. European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Spatial Data Infrastructures Unit