Book Image

WS-BPEL 2.0 Beginner's Guide

By : Matjaz B Juric
Book Image

WS-BPEL 2.0 Beginner's Guide

By: Matjaz B Juric

Overview of this book

If you are a software architect, a designer, a software developer, an SOA and BPM architect, a project manager, or a business process analyst who is responsible for the design and development of business processes, composite applications, and BPM/SOA solutions, then this book is for you. You should have a clear grasp of general SOA concepts including business processes and web services, but no prior knowledge of the BPEL language is required.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
13
Index

Service invocation and orchestration

In the previous chapter, we learned the basics of BPEL. We learned that BPEL processes can be synchronous or asynchronous. BPEL processes consist of activities. A process usually begins with a <receive> activity, which is responsible for receiving the request from the process client. Then, the BPEL process executes some logic. So far, we have become familiar with the <assign> activity for manipulating variables and with the <if> activity for conditions.

We have also learned that BPEL is a programming-in-the-large language, meaning that we do not program distinct functionalities in BPEL. Rather, we use BPEL to orchestrate services—in other words, it invokes several services in a specific order to perform a certain business process.

In a typical scenario, the BPEL business process receives a request. To fulfill it, the process then invokes the involved services and finally responds to the original caller. Every BPEL process specifies...