Develop rich Web clients for business process applications with WID, WPS, and Adobe Flex

Develop rich Web clients for business process applications with WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere process Server, and Adobe Flex

Brief introduction

You can use the WebSphere process Server V6 to design and manage all types of business processes, especially people-centric business processes that may contain human interaction. Typically, the Java client uses the Business flow Manager and the Human task Manager Java APIs to interact with business processes and human tasks. In this article, we describe how to use the Web service APIs provided by Process Server in a Flex application to interact with business processes and human tasks.

Process Server provides two Web service interfaces:

The Business Flow Manager API (BFM API), which enables client applications to interact with micro-streams and long-running processes.

The Human task Manager API (HTM API), which allows client applications to create tasks, declare and complete existing tasks, and so on.

This article contains a sample enterprise application process, which has a human task activity, and a Flex client that interacts with this process. Discusses how to use Flex to start a process, declare, and complete a human task by issuing a WEB service request. It also discusses how to develop additional Web service client applications that use the BFM and HTM Web service APIs to access business processes and human tasks running in the Business process choreographer environment.

The purpose of this article is to explain how to use Flex to create a rich Web client that enables clients to connect business processes through the BFM and HTM Web service APIs. This article will lead you through the following tasks:

Creating a Business process application

Research BFM and HTM Web service APIs

Create a rich Web client using Flex

Figure 1 says the schema of an example application.

Figure 1. Schema of the sample application