06291 Workshop Report: Conversation Patterns

In a service-oriented architecture systems communicate by exchanging messages. Message passing provides for robust and loosely coupled interaction but it also provides less structure than traditional RPC models, which are based on a fairly rigid request-response interaction style. Instead, messages exchanged over time between a set of parties can form a multitude of conversations. An expressive contract between communicating parties should define a coordination protocol that describes which conversations are legal. Such a protocol can be expressed in different ways, for example through choreography or public endpoint process definitions. The purpose of conversations patterns is to document common forms of conversations in the design pattern format, highlighting design trade-offs and popular implementations. As part of the Dagstuhl Seminar 06291 on The Role of Business Processes in Service Oriented Architectures in July 2006 we held a Workshop on Conversation Patterns. In this paper, we report on the results of this workshop.