Editorial message - Special track on Service-Oriented Architectures and Programming (SOAP)

The SOAP track aims to bring together researchers and practitioners with the objective of transforming service-oriented programming into a discipline with solid scientific foundations and mature software engineering development methodologies supported by dedicated tools. From the foundational point of view, many attempts to use formal methods for specification and verification in this setting have been made. Session correlation, service types, contract theories and communication patterns are only a few examples of the aspects that have been investigated. Moreover, several formal models based upon automata, Petri nets and algebraic approaches have been developed. However, most of these approaches concentrate on only a few features of service-oriented systems in isolation, and a comprehensive approach is still far from being achieved. From the engineering point of view, there are open issues at many levels. At the system design level, both traditional approaches based on UML and approaches taking inspiration from business process modelling, like BPMN, are used. At the composition level, orchestration and choreography are continuously improved both formally and practically, with an evident need for their integration in the development process. At the description and discovery level, there are two separate communities pushing respectively the semantic approach (like ontologies and OWL) and the syntactic one (like WSDL). In particular, the role of discovery engines and protocols is not clear yet. In this respect, adopted standards are still to be achieved, taking features like Quality of Service, security and dependability into account.