Engineering Foundations of Web Services

Recent years have seen the emergence of a new style of development of distributed software applications, such as e-commerce web sites. This style is known as "web services", and is characterised by the notion that a "machine-readable web site", or web service, provides information to a software application in the same way that a conventional web site provides information to a human user. Web services thus provides an infrastructure for the development of distributed applications which are able to integrate information and computational resources from diverse locations into a single service provided to the end-user. At the infrastructural level, web services offer powerful and general universal infrastructure for naming, communication and data representation to diverse kinds of applications. For software development, web services represent a fundamental transformation of software development style in the main stream of application development, and this leads to a number of engineering challenges which must be addressed in order to establish sound programming methodologies for the delivery of safe, secure and robust systems. This project will build on established theories of communication-based systems and transfer them to the arena of web services, in order to provide a foundation for software development techniques and tools to support successful programming in this new style.

Funding

The project is funded by EPSRC through grants EP/E065708/1, EP/F003757/1 and EP/F002114/1.

The project runs from 1st December 2007 to 31st May 2011.

People and Institutions

Imperial College London, Department of Computing

Dr Nobuko Yoshida, Principal Investigator
Andi Bejleri, PhD student
Raymond Hu, PhD student
Dimitris Mostrous, PhD student

Queen Mary, University of London, Department of Computer Science

Dr Kohei Honda, Principal Investigator
Dr Marco Carbone, Research Associate

University of Glasgow, Department of Computing Science

Dr Simon Gay, Principal Investigator
Dr Nils Gesbert, Research Associate

Pi4 Technologies Foundation

The Pi4 Technologies Foundation is our industrial partner.

Steve Ross-Talbot
Gary Brown

Former Members

Dr Martin Berger, former Research Associate at Imperial College London, is now a lecturer in the School of Informatics, University of Sussex.

Publications

M. Dezani-Ciancaglini, D. Mostrous, N. Yoshida, and S. Drossopoulou. Session Types for Object-Oriented Languages.
Information and Computation (to appear), 2009.
Conference version from ECOOP 2006.

S. J. Gay, V. T. Vasconcelos, A. Ravara and N. Gesbert. Dynamic Interfaces.
In: International Workshop on Foundations of Object-Oriented Languages (FOOL), 2009.
Submitted version.

M. Carbone, K. Honda and N. Yoshida. Structured Interactional Exceptions in Session Types.
In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR).
Springer-Verlag LNCS 5201, 2008.
Conference version, full version.

S. J. Gay. Bounded Polymorphism in Session Types.
In: Mathematical Structures in Computer Science 18(5):895-930, 2008.
DOI:10.1017/S0960129508006944

S. J. Gay and V. T. Vasconcelos. Linear Type Theory for Asynchronous Session Types, 2008.
Submitted version.

L. Bettini, M. Coppo, L. D'Antoni, M. De Luca, M. Dezani-Ciancaglini and N. Yoshida .
Global Progress in Dynamically Merged Multiparty Sessions.
Conference version.

M. Berger, K. Honda and N. Yoshida. Completeness and Logical Full Abstraction in Modal Logics for Typed Mobile Processes.
In: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Automata, Logic and Programming (ICALP).
Springer-Verlag LNCS 5126, 2008.
Conference version, full version (draft).

R. Hu, N. Yoshida and K. Honda. Session-Based Distributed Programming in Java.
In: Proceedings of the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP).
Springer-Verlag LNCS 5142, 2008.
Conference version.

K. Honda, N. Yoshida and M. Carbone. Multiparty Asynchronous Session Types.
In: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL).
ACM Press, 2008.
Conference version, full version.

G. Castagna, N. Gesbert and L. Padovani. A Theory of Contracts for Web Services.
In: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL).
ACM Press, 2008.
Conference version, full version.

M. Carbone, K. Honda and N. Yoshida. Structured Communication-Centred Programming for Web Services.
In: Proceedings of the European Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems (ESOP).
Springer-Verlag LNCS 4421, 2007.
Full version.