Instructions in an asynchronous transactional messaging language are transformed into instructions that are compatible with the web services. In one embodiment, the asynchronous transactional messaging language is XLANG/s, and the web service languages are the web services description language (WSDL) and the simple object access protocol (SOAP). A programmer simply writes high level declarative statements that pertain to the specific type of business transaction. During compilation, selected instructions are transformed into instructions that are compatible with web services. This transformation is transparent to the designer of the business application. The asynchronous transactional messaging language source files are compiled in an iterative compilation process. During each pass of this compilation process, different variables are parsed. The parsed results are logically organized in a tree structure. The tree structure is traversed in depth first traversal order. During this traversal, instructions are transformed into instructions compatible with web services.