Contracts are behavioral descriptions of Web services. We devise a theory of contracts that formalizes the compatibility of a client to a service, and the safe replacement of a service with another service. The use of contracts statically ensures the successful completion of every possible interaction between compatible clients and services. The technical device that underlies the theory is the filter, which is an explicit coercion preventing some possible behaviors of services and, in doing so, make services compatible with different usage scenarios. We show that filters can be seen as proofs of a sound and complete subcontracting deduction system which simultaneously refines and extends Hennessy’s classical axiomatization of the must testing preorder. The relation is decidable and the decision algorithm is obtained via a cut-elimination process that proves the coherence of subcontracting as a logical system. Despite the richness of the technical development, the resulting approach is based on simple ideas and basic intuitions. Remarkably, its application is mostly independent of the language used to program the services or the clients. We outline the practical aspects of our theory by studying two different concrete syntaxes for contracts and applying each of them to Web services languages. We also explore implementation issues of filters and discuss the perspectives of future research

this paper has generated a veritable industry of results on the meta-theory of SOS and process algebras. (See [10] for a mention of some of these achievements and pointers to the original literature.) The proof techniques used in these results were extremely ingenious, and have paved the way to many similar developments. Again, the role played by the modal characterizations of behavioural equivalences in the proof of the characterizations of the largest congruences is remarkable

We tackle an open question of Milner ([10]). We define a set of so-called well-behaved finite automata that, modulo bisimulation equivalence, corresponds exactly to the set of regular expressions. 1