Book Image

WS-BPEL 2.0 for SOA Composite Applications with Oracle SOA Suite 11g

Book Image

WS-BPEL 2.0 for SOA Composite Applications with Oracle SOA Suite 11g

Overview of this book

Business Process Execution Language (BPEL, aka WS-BPEL) has become the de-facto standard for orchestrating services in SOA composite applications. BPEL reduces the gap between business requirements and applications and allows for better alignment between business processes and underlying IT architecture. BPEL is for SOA what SQL is for databases. Therefore learning BPEL is essential for the successful adoption of SOA or the development of composite applications. Although BPEL looks simple at first sight, it hides its large potential and has many interesting and advanced features. If you can get familiar with these features - you can maximize the value of SOA. This book provides a comprehensive and detailed coverage of BPEL, one of the centerpieces of SOA. It covers basic and advanced features of BPEL 2.0 and provides several real-world examples. In addition to BPEL specification the book provides comprehensive coverage of BPEL support in Oracle SOA Suite 11g, including security, transactions, human workflow, process monitoring, automatic generation of BPEL from process models, dynamic processes, and more. This book starts with an introduction to BPEL, its role with regard to SOA and the process-oriented approach to SOA. The authors give short descriptions of the most important SOA platforms and BPEL servers—the run time environments for the execution of business processes specified in BPEL—and compare BPEL to other business process languages. The book will then move on to explain core concepts such as invoking services, synchronous and asynchronous processes, partner links, role of WSDL, variables, flows, and more.Moving ahead you will become familiar with fault handling, transaction management and compensation handling, scopes, events and event handlers, concurrent activities and links. The authors also discuss the business process lifecycle, correlation of messages, dynamic partner links, abstract business processes and mapping from BPMN to BPEL. The book presents in detail, how to use BPEL with Oracle SOA Suite 11g PS2. It explains the development of BPEL and SCA assemblies, and demonstrates different approaches with some practical examples. It addresses security, transaction handling, and human workflow. Then, the book addresses entity variables, notification services, fault management framework, and business events in BPEL. It provides exhaustive coverage of monitoring BPEL processes and developing dashboards with Oracle BAM. It explains how to use BPEL processes with Oracle Service Bus and Oracle Service Registry. Using examples, the book also demonstrates how to transform business process models in BPMN (using Business Modeler) to BPEL, how to achieve round-tripping using BPA Suite and BPM Suite, and how to use Oracle Enterprise Repository to govern BPEL processes. The book also covers the complete BPM lifecycle from modeling through implementation, execution, monitoring, and optimization and presents advanced, real-world examples.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
WS-BPEL 2.0 for SOA Composite Applications with Oracle SOA Suite 11g
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

BPEL servers overview


BPEL servers provide a runtime environment for executing BPEL business processes. Today BPEL servers are usually part of the SOA platform, which in addition to the BPEL server includes other elements of a complete SOA environment application server, ESB, registry and repository, human tasks support, process monitoring, BRMS (Rule Engine), and adapters. Often a development environment is included and sometimes a process modeling tool is also available. Most advanced SOA platforms support the automatic translation of business models into executable BPEL processes.

Most SOA platforms have been developed on top of modern software platforms, particularly Java Enterprise Edition and Microsoft .NET. BPEL servers leverage Java Enterprise Edition or .NET application server environments, where they can make use of the services provided by application servers, such as security, transactions, scalability, integration with databases, components such as EJBs (Enterprise Java Beans) and COM+ (Component Object Model), messaging systems such as JMS (Java Message Service) or MSMQ (Microsoft Message Queue), and so on.

The most important commercial SOA platforms with BPEL servers are listed below:

Microsoft also provides an SOA platform, although Microsoft does not use the acronym SOA as often as the other suppliers. Microsoft's SOA is built around Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, and Microsoft BizTalk (process server). In contrast to most of the other vendors, Microsoft does not support BPEL natively (yet). Microsoft BizTalk, at the time of writing, still uses XLANG/s, the Microsoft proprietary orchestration language. However, it allows for the import and export of BPEL.

An important supporter of SOA is SAP. SAP Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture (Enterprise SOA) has been defined by SAP as "an open architecture for adaptive business solutions". Enterprise SOA is enabled by the SAP NetWeaver platform. SAP has positioned Enterprise SOA to deliver the benefits offered by service-oriented architecture, including enabling both flexibility and business efficiency. Most of SAP products, such as mySAP ERP, mySAP CRM, and mySAP SRM, are built upon Enterprise SOA.

There are also a few open source implementations:

In the following chapters we will use Oracle SOA Suite platform, including JDeveloper and Oracle BPEL Process Manager. Please keep in mind however that BPEL is an open specification therefore it does not differ between the products. BPEL code is portable between different BPEL servers. This holds true as long as you are not using some vendor-specific extensions. Therefore, in the next chapters we will first look at standard BPEL. Then, we will look how to use BPEL using Oracle SOA Suite.