Chapter 20 Working with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Introducing to SOA Process Language

SOA is a logical executable process language that allows you to orchestrate your processes without being linked to any platform or language. It belongs to the Service Orchestration family.

The SOA process language is very close to BPEL4WS, except that:

It has no generation and reverse functions
Any type of operation can be attached to a process (BPEL4WS only supports One-Way and Request-Response operations on processes)
No correlation key can be defined for sent messages

An SOA BPM is a model that allows you to assemble software components that are designed by a WSDL. Therefore, you can import WSDL files in an SOA BPM.

When to work with Service Oriented Architecture?

When you decide to use the Service Oriented Architecture process language, you generally do not know yet which platform you are going to use to execute your processes. However, SOA allows you to design the Web services orchestration by providing access to service providers, service interfaces and operations.

You can afterwards use the Change Target feature or the Model to Model Generation feature to change to the appropriate platform or language.

For more information on the Change Target feature, see section Changing the process language of a BPM in chapter Business process Model Basics.

For more information on the Model to Model generation feature, see the Generating Other Models from a BPM chapter.