Flow Modeling Concepts

In WSFL, flow models are used for the specification of complex interactions of services. A flow model describes a usage pattern of a collection of available services, so that the composition of those services provides the functionality needed to achieve a certain business goal—that is, the composition describes a business process. The flow model specifies precisely how those services (steps in the flow) are combined, specifying in which order they have to be performed (including the possibility of concurrent execution), the conditional logic deciding whether an individual step or a group of steps have to be performed at all or should be looped, and the passing of data between the involved steps.

Figure 18.1 shows an example ...

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