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 better alignment between business processes and underlying IT architecture. BPEL is for SOA what SQL is for databases. Therefore, learning BPEL is essential for successful adoption of SOA or development of composite applications. Although BPEL looks easy at first sight, it hides large potential and has many interesting advanced features that you should get familiar with in order to maximize the value of SOA.
This book provides a comprehensive and detailed coverage of BPEL, one of the center pieces of SOA. It covers basic and advanced features of BPEL 2.0 and provides several real-world examples. In addition to the BPEL specification, the book provides comprehensive coverage of BPEL support in the IBM WebSphere SOA platform including security, transactions, human workflow, process monitoring, automatic generation of BPEL from process models, dynamic processes, and many more.
Chapter 1, Introduction to BPEL and SOA, introduces BPEL, defining its role with regard to SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture), and explaining the process-oriented approach to SOA and the role of BPEL. It also provides short descriptions of the most important BPEL servers and compares BPEL to other business process languages.
Chapter 2, Service Composition with BPEL, describes how to define a BPEL process and makes you familiar with the basic concepts of service composition with BPEL. It also defines two example BPEL processes for business travels and shows how to develop a synchronous and then an asynchronous process.
Chapter 3, Advanced BPEL, makes you familiar with the advanced concepts of BPEL, such as loops, process termination, delays, and deadline and duration expressions and also addresses fault handling, which is a very important aspect of each business process.
Chapter 4, BPEL Processes with IBM WebSphere, illustrates how to develop BPEL processes in IBM WebSphere Integration Developer and deploy and run the BPEL processes on the IBM WebSphere Process Server.
Chapter 5, Human Interactions in BPEL, describes the different approaches to human workflow support in BPEL and analyzes their relevance in practical scenarios, and discusses real-world scenarios in which BPEL and human workflow services are used. It also describes two specifications, BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask.
Chapter 6, Securing BPEL Processes, describes how to get familiar with basic security concepts on WebSphere Application Server regarding protection of BPEL processes and looks at how to secure BPEL processes, so that they can be accessed only by authenticated users.
Chapter 7, Iterative Process Development from BPMN to BPEL, describes how to achieve synchronization between a business process model and process implementation. It models the Travel Approval process and uses this process for different synchronization scenarios such as initial, technical, business, and round-trip synchronization.
Chapter 8, Monitoring Business Processes, covers the basic concepts of Business Monitoring also known as Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). It also explains how to use IBM WebSphere to monitor BPEL processes and shows how to develop a monitor model and a dashboard in WebSphere.
Chapter 9, IBM BPM Enabled by SOA: Overview, discusses the core capabilities needed for a process integration approach, IBM's SOA reference architecture, and IBM's Business Process Management platform including WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus. It then looks at the fundamental SOA programming model concepts and explains how these concepts apply in the context of WID/WPS/WESB.
Chapter 10, IBM BPM Enabled By SOA — BPM in the Cloud, Dynamic Processes, and Advanced Topics, discusses several topics ranging from strategy maps creation to deployment and management of solutions on top of WebSphere BPM using the various tools provided.
Appendix A, BPEL 2.0 Syntax Reference, provides a syntax reference for WS-BPEL (Web Services Business Process Execution Language). This can be downloaded from http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/0462_Appendix.zip.
In the course of this book, you will need the following software utilities to try out the various code examples listed:
IBM WebSphere Process Server 7.0
IBM WebSphere Application Server 7.0
IBM WebSphere Integration Developer 7.0
IBM WebSphere Business Modeler Advanced 7.0
IBM WebSphere Business Monitor 7.0
IBM WebSphere Business Space 7.0
This book is aimed at SOA architects and developers involved in the design, implementation, and integration of composite applications and end-to-end business processes. The book provides comprehensive coverage of WS-BPEL 2.0 for implementing business processes and developing SCA composite applications, dealing with the issues of composition, orchestration, transactions, coordination, and security. This book uses IBM WebSphere SOA platform version 7.0. To follow this book, you need to have a basic knowledge of XML, web services, and Java EE.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "The role of the BPEL process (myRole) is described as insurance requester and the partner role is described as insurance service."
A block of code is set as follows:
<partnerLinks> <partnerLink name="insurance" partnerLinkType="tns:insuranceLT" myRole="insuranceRequester" partnerRole="insuranceService"/> </partnerLinks>
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<!-- Invoke a set of related services, concurrently --> <flow> <invoke ... /> <invoke ... /> <invoke ... /> </flow>
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$variableName.messagePart/ns:node/ns:node...
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Select packtpub.com module, fill out Target file to which the change report will be saved, and click on Finish."
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