Book Image

Application Development for IBM WebSphere Process Server 7 and Enterprise Service Bus 7

Book Image

Application Development for IBM WebSphere Process Server 7 and Enterprise Service Bus 7

Overview of this book

By adopting an SOA approach in Business Process Management (BPM), you can make your application flexible, reusable, and adaptable to new developments. The SOA approach also gives you the potential to lower costs (from reuse), and increase revenue (from adaptability and flexibility). However, integrating basic SOA constructs (such as Process, Business Services, and Components) and core building blocks of BPM (such as Process Modeling and Enterprise Service Bus) in a real-world application can be challenging.This book introduces basic concepts of Business Integration, SOA Fundamentals, and SOA Programming Model and implements them in numerous examples. It guides you to building an Order Management application from scratch using the principles of Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture and using WebSphere Process Server (WPS) and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (WESB). The various detailed aspects, features, and capabilities of the product are conveyed through examplesWe begin with essential concepts on Business Integration, SOA Fundamentals and SOA Programming Model. Then we set up the development environment to build your first Hello Process and Hello Mediation applications.Gradually, we build an SOA-based Order Management Application. We cover important aspects and functions of WPS and WESB with numerous practical examples. We show how to analyze your application's business requirements and check if an SOA approach is appropriate for your project. Then you do a top-down decomposition of your application and identify its use cases, business processes, and services. Having built the SOA Application, we introduce you to various non-functional topics, including: Administration, Governance, Management, Monitoring, and Security. We also discuss deployment topologies for WPS and WESB, performance tuning, and recommended practices.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Application Development for IBM WebSphere Process Server 7 and Enterprise Service Bus 7
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface
WID, WPS, and WESB Tips, Tricks, and Pointers
Index

IBM's SOA Foundation lifecycle


The IBM SOA Foundation is an integrated open standards-based set of IBM software, best practices, and patterns. The key elements of the IBM SOA Foundation are the SOA life cycle (model, assemble, deploy, manage), reference architecture, and SOA scenarios. IBM's SOA Foundation lifecycle consists of the following iterative phases and some of the key activities performed:

  • Model

    • Gather key business requirements, objectives, and success criteria

    • Model business processes based on requirements and objectives

    • Identify KPIs and instance metrics

    • Perform business process model simulations

    • Service discovery and identification

  • Assemble

    • Service Components Assembly based on business design

    • Service specification, realization, and implementation

    • Business process assembly and implementation leveraging new and existing services and components

    • End application connectivity including routing, message transformation, protocol transformation, and so on

    • Creating the monitoring model based on KPIs

  • Deploy

    • Preparation of the hosting/operational environment

    • Integration testing of solution

    • Software configuration management activities

  • Manage

    • Administer deployed applications, processes, services, and components

    • Monitor KPIs and instance metrics

    • Feed real-time monitor metrics to fine-tune the business process model

    • Plan for growth based on operational performance and metrics

    • User security

  • Govern (that spans all phases)

    • Process and service lifecycle governance

    • Ensure process controls and compliance

When developing SOA-based solutions, you can adopt the SOA lifecycle by mapping what activities are performed in which phase and also identify which tools and products can be used to fulfill activities in that phase. The lifecycle, as shown in the following figure, outlines the key IBM products that could be used to fulfill some of the key activities in each phase to deliver the solution. Products marked in bold are the ones we will be covering in this book.