Abstract
Service orchestrations are frequently used to assemble software components along business processes. Despite much research and empirical studies into the use of control-flow structures of these specialized languages, like BPEL and BPMN2, no empirical evaluation of data-flow structures and languages, like XPath, XSLT, and XQuery, has been made yet. This paper presents a case study on the use of data transformation languages in industry projects in different companies and across different domains, thereby showing that data flow is an important and complex property of such orchestrations. The results also show that proprietary extensions are used frequently and that the design favors the use of modules, which allows for reusing and testing code. This case study is a starting point for further research into the data-flow dimension of service orchestrations and gives insights into practical problems that future standards and theories can rely on.
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Lübke, D., Unger, T., Wutke, D. (2019). Analysis of Data-Flow Complexity and Architectural Implications. In: Lübke, D., Pautasso, C. (eds) Empirical Studies on the Development of Executable Business Processes. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17666-2_4
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