Patent ID: 7437710

Claim:
A method of specifying a stateful web service comprising: first facilitating, by an integrated development environment of a computing device, a user in providing a source code representation of at least a portion of web service logic, the logic including one or more methods; second facilitating, by the integrated development environment of the computing device, the user in identifying one of said one or more methods to be exposed as part of the stateful web service; and in response to user input, automatically specifying, by the integrated development environment of the computing device, one or more declarative annotations within the source code representation, the declarative annotations, when recognized by a compiler through analysis of the represented portion of web service logic which includes the declarative annotations, causing the compiler to generate one or more persistent components to maintain conversational state related to the identified method; wherein the one or more declarative annotations indicate to the compiler whether the identified method is at least one of a start method, a continue method, or a finish method, wherein the start method applies to start of a stateful conversation between a client and the web service, the continue method applies to continuation of an ongoing stateful conversation between a client and the web service, and the finish method applies to completion of an ongoing stateful conversation between a client and the web service.