Bliss: Specifying Declarative Service Protocols

BSPL, the Blindingly Simple Protocol Language, is a recent approach for declaratively expressing service communication protocols that involves only two main constructs: a way to specify a message as an atomic protocol and a way to compose protocols. BSPL supports the Local State Transfer architectural style for decentralized service enactment. BSPL offers significant gains in expressing protocols (i.e., specifications) that decouple participants in service engagements (i.e., agents) as much as possible given the causal constraints induced from the information exchanged by them. Importantly, BSPL relies exclusively on how appropriate information flows are induced from the specification. This paper proposes Bliss, a conceptual model for interaction that is based on information flow. The idea behind Bliss is to incrementally develop the information needed to complete the social object that a protocol computes. Bliss yields simple steps to help ensure that the resulting protocol adequately captures the given requirements with respect to the social object.