Chapter 1. Introducing IBM BPM and ESB

JungleSea Inc. is a fictitious online retailer who sells a wide range of products including books, digital media, and electronics. They have a wide network of suppliers and partners, who participate in their ecosystem. JungleSea is under constant pressure to respond quickly to tactical changes happening in the market place, while adopting new business and operating models for rapid strategic change. Architects within JungleSea have been a big proponents of a Business Process Management (BPM) enabled by a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach to help business and IT decisions to be aligned better. By adopting a BPM-SOA approach, they have, over time, demonstrated how they were able to reach the flexibility, reuse, and adaptability that made them better prepared to compete and win against their competitors. The SOA approach also gave them the potential to lower costs (from reuse), and increase revenue (from adaptability and flexibility). JungleSea Inc. had already selected and decided that it would use IBM WebSphere Process Server (WPS) and IBM WebSphere Enterprise Services Bus (WESB) as its core platform for its BPM enabled by SOA.

JungleSea's IT, like any other organization, has multi-faceted, multi-skilled, and multi-leveled employees. From time to time, they hire new people to infuse new blood and thinking into the system. Quite naturally, a BPM-enabled SOA approach can get overwhelming for new hires. This book is about taking the reader through a mentorship journey. The style of the book will be such that the reader will be introduced to the fundamental concepts, then walk them through numerous examples, and finally the journey of building an application using the principles of BPM and SOA and using WPS and WESB.

Alongside the journey, we will be using WPS and WESB as the vehicle to build the SOA application; the various detailed aspects, features, and capabilities of the product will be conveyed though examples. It will also provide practical and pragmatic guidance on various aspects in relation to building the SOA application. Every section will have solutions to common problems and pitfalls. The purpose of this book is to enable the reader to assume the role of the mentee (one who is being mentored; source: Merriam-Webster) and how he/she is introduced to various concepts in SOA, BPM Integration, and so on, and how we apply all these concepts while building a solution. The style of the book is:

In the first part, we will focus on the basics and overview of the key and essential concepts that a reader will require to go forward with the book. We will give a crash course on Business Integration, SOA Fundamentals, and SOA Programming Model. Then we will have the environment set up. Then, to give the reader a feel for the product, build the first Hello Process (with WPS) and Hello Mediation (with WESB) applications.

In the second part, we will build an SOA-based Order Management Application (named Sales Fulfillment Application) for JungleSea Inc. We will guide the reader through the various aspects and functions of WPS and WESB, which are absolutely necessary, through numerous practical examples. Then we will analyze the business requirements and rationalize our thoughts to see if an SOA approach is the right way. Then we will build SOA-based architecture, do a top-down decomposition, and identify use cases (and scenarios), business processes, and services/components.

In the third and final part, having built the SOA Application for JungleSea Inc., we will take the reader through various non-functional topics including Administration, Governance, Management, Monitoring, and Security. We will also discuss deployment topologies for WPS and WESB, performance tuning, and recommended practices. Finally, we will address a series of 'How Do I' questions that a reader typically ask.

In this chapter, we will: