Chapter 8 Building an Executable BPM: Working with Service Description Objects
The executable BPM allows you to retrieve the work performed at the analysis level and to refine it by specifying the implementation of atomic processes.
The executable BPM focuses on the implementation of one side of the collaboration in a collaborative BPM. It focuses on the execution of distributed components. You use the executable BPM to design a process internal to an organization.
The executable BPM is a choreography of different activities. The main activity is the invocation of external services that can be:
The executable BPM can help you reduce implementation time. It is a bridge to your choice of implementation environment, as it allows you to generate XML formats or code artifacts for specific process engines. You will not have to redefine the BPM again within the target process engine. The BPM can be executed using generation targets that describe the business process in a way the required engine can process it.
In the executable BPM, the following generation targets are supported:
BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web services) is a public XML-based workflow definition language that allows businesses to describe processes that can both consume and provide Web services. Essentially, BPEL4WS is a common construct for addressing business process semantics within a heterogeneous enterprise and among diverse external business partners.
For more information about BPEL4WS, see the bibliography in the About this book section of this manual.
Sybase Integration Orchestrator is a proprietary assembling tool for application integration and Web services. With this tool, companies rapidly integrate systems and can access, analyze and act-upon information from a variety of sources.
It allows you to easily integrate your business activities with those of your partners, disregarding the specific development platform each party has chosen to use and to focus on business solution.
The executable BPM corresponds to the implementation phase of the business process modeling. This phase occurs once your BPM is validated, optimized, and that you know exactly what to do to implement the process.
Each step within the process corresponds to a single business activity that is implemented as an interaction with a Web service. For each given activity, you need to check whether you can reuse an existing distributed component to accomplish it.
For more information about how to retrieve web services in a BPM, see section Importing WSDL in an Executable BPM.
You can then represent the retrieved Web services using service description objects. These objects do not have any graphical symbol in the diagram.
For more information about service description objects, see sections Defining Service Providers, Defining Service Interfaces, and Defining Operations in an Executable BPM.
For the Web service to be properly used by the process (or activity) that calls it, you have to define specific properties in the process property sheet and orchestration elements.
For more information about the call of a Web service by a process, see section Defining processes in an executable BPM in chapter Building an executable BPM: Managing Data and Orchestration.
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