Guest editor's introduction: Special issue on Web Services and Formal Methods

摘要

The new networking and computing technologies call for the design of new programming paradigms. Service oriented computing is emerging as one of the most promising novelties in this perspective. Services are simple platform neutral, heterogeneous, self-describing components that can be retrieved and invoked using XML-based interoperable standardized mechanisms. Web Services is the main technology supporting such a paradigm. Besides the new XML-based mechanisms for publishing, retrieving and invoking services, the most interesting innovations are devoted to the definition of languages for the specification of complex services out of simpler ones, the so called Web Service orchestration and choreography.