WebSphere Integration Developer Guide Tutorial part 5th

WebSphere Integration Developer Guide Tutorial 5th Business processes in a service-oriented world

Introduction

Currently, you have learned the key concepts of WebSphere integration Developer and its supporting tools through the first three articles and are ready to delve into the business process. If you haven't read the fourth article about the business state machine, don't worry; you can go back and read it later, because it's not a prerequisite for learning this article. In fact, if you read the previous article roughly, but you don't have time to complete a simple application, you can later download the Orderprocessing module at the end of this article and use it as a starting point for building your business process.

As you may already know, a business process is any system or program that your organization uses to accomplish larger business goals. You can automate a business process, or you can do so by several steps that need to be completed manually by one or more users. A business process can run for a short period of time, or it can be hours, days, weeks, or longer. Business processes can drive your business well, but building business processes in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) can make your applications overuse. In summary, if you can seamlessly integrate your business processes with other components and modules, you can produce very powerful functionality to automate your work.

With WebSphere integration Developer, you can use the Orchestration Editor to create business processes. Business processes provide the primary means of harmonizing enterprise services and describing business logic. So, what does that mean? A business process is the implementation of a service component consisting of a series of steps or activities that run in a particular order. These activities can invoke other services, perform calculations, or perform any kind of programming work. Activities in a process can be run sequentially or in parallel. You can also implement branches or loops in the control flow between activities. A business process can be part of a larger business process, and it can also contain nested business processes.

In the following sections, you will learn:

Components of a business process

The concept of a business process

Business Process Editor

Build your own business processes.

Business Process Analysis

If you read a previous article about a business state machine, you might know that a business state machine is a special case of a business process. Let me give you a little secret, the business process is actually implementing a state machine. Both business state machines and business processes are important techniques for defining business logic. You may be baffled by the following questions: "If they are all very important and very similar, how do I know when to use a business process and when to use a state machine?" ”

The answer is that if the business logic includes a response to the event, and the response depends on the current state of the process, it can be useful to implement the logic as a business state machine. A state machine is also useful when logic is essentially a circular logic (that is, a part of an object or system repeats a series of States). For example, a vending machine waits for a coin, then allows you to buy a drink, then retrieves the change, and then waits patiently for the next shopper. On the other hand, business processes are useful for all other situations, especially if your business logic requires sequential or parallel execution of a series of steps.

SOA consists of a number of connected services that can communicate with each other to achieve the overall goal. As you learned from previous articles, business processes are one of the ways you implement serviced components.

The business process consists of the following elements, which we will explore in a later section:

Activities

Our Partners

Variable

Correlation Set

Processing program