Book Image

BPEL Cookbook: Best Practices for SOA-based integration and composite applications development

By : Arun Poduval, Doug Todd, Harish Gaur, Jeremy Bolie, Jerry Thomas, Kevin Geminiuc, Lawrence Pravin, Markus Zirn, Matjaz B. Juric, Michael Cardella, Praveen Ramachandran, Sean Carey, Stany Blanvalet, The Hoa Nguyen, Yves Coene
Book Image

BPEL Cookbook: Best Practices for SOA-based integration and composite applications development

By: Arun Poduval, Doug Todd, Harish Gaur, Jeremy Bolie, Jerry Thomas, Kevin Geminiuc, Lawrence Pravin, Markus Zirn, Matjaz B. Juric, Michael Cardella, Praveen Ramachandran, Sean Carey, Stany Blanvalet, The Hoa Nguyen, Yves Coene

Overview of this book

<p>Service Oriented Architecture is generating a buzz across the whole IT industry. Propelled by standards-based technologies like XML, Web Services, and SOAP, SOA is quickly moving from pilot projects to mainstream applications critical to business operations. One of the key standards accelerating the adoption of SOA is Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL). <br /><br />BPEL was created to enable effective composition of web services in a service-oriented environment. In the past two years, BPEL has become the most significant standard to elevate the visibility of SOA from IT to business level. BPEL is not only commoditizing the integration market, but it is also offering organizations a whole new level of agility - ability to rapidly change applications in response to the changing business landscape. BPEL enables organizations to automate their business processes by orchestrating services within and across the firewall. It forces organizations to think in terms of services. Existing functionality is exposed as services. New applications are composed using services. Communication with external vendors and partners is through services. Services are reused across different applications. Services are, or should be, everywhere!</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
BPEL Cookbook
Credits
About the Editors
About the Authors
Foreword
Dismantling SOA Hype: A Real-World Perspective

Development and Maintenance


To illustrate the development process, we will use the example of a business process called the Eligibility Process. This process assesses the eligibility of a family for a specific healthcare program. Depending on the attributes of the family (income, total number of children), it assigns the family to Healthcare Program 1 or Healthcare Program 2. During the analysis phase, logic is categorized into different buckets based on volatility and complexity. As discussed in the previous section, rules typically model complex return structures that require multiple business validations as well as policies that change frequently or that influence large parts of the organization. In contrast, departmental or organizational processes are modeled in the business process layer.

The typical development process comprises three steps:

  1. 1. Create rules in a ruleset.

  2. 2. Expose the ruleset as a web service.

  3. 3. Invoke the ruleset web service from BPEL.

The development phase requires...