Building Web Services with Time Requirements

Developing web services with timing requirements is a difficult task, as existing technology does not provide standard mechanisms to support real-time execution, or even to detect and predict timing violations. However, in business-critical environments, an operation that does not conclude on due time may be completely useless, and may result in service abandonment, reputation, or monetary losses. This chapter presents a framework that allows deploying web services with temporal failure detection and prediction capabilities. Detection is based on timing restrictions defined at execution time and historical data is used for failure prediction according to prediction modules. Additional modules can be added to the framework to provide more advanced failure detection and prediction capabilities. The framework enables providers to easily develop and deploy time-aware web services, with the failure detection code decoupled from the application logic, and allows consumers to express their timeliness requirements.