The BPEL Designer

The BPEL Designer provides a highly-graphic framework that allows you to create and visualize business processes that are compliant with the WS-BPEL 2.0 specification. The BPEL Designer feature of the NetBeans IDE allows you to easily create and edit BPEL processes. These processes can then be executed by the BPEL Service Engine on the GlassFish Application Server.

The BPEL Designer consists of four editing windows called views:

• Source View: The Source tab displays the underlying code for the business process. You can use the Source view to write your entire business process if you like, or just use it to review and edit the underlying code created when using the BPEL Designer's automated features to create your business process.

• Design View:The Design view provides a highly-graphical BPEL editor that lets you visually author a diagram of your business process by adding, editing, configuring and deleting BPEL elements. Elements are selected from the BPEL Designer Palette and dropped directly into the Design diagram. The constructed diagram in the Design view is automatically generated into BPEL source code compliant with the BPEL 2.0 specification.

• Mapper View: The Mapper tab provides a framework for processing and directing business process data. The Mapper is designed to enable you to graphically edit activities that have various expressions: assignments, conditions, and queries, the most common of these being XPath expressions.

• Logging View: The Logging mapper enables you to graphically define and "tune up" server side logging. Logging is used to write specified expression values or partner link endpoint reference information to the server log, and alerting enables the user to to be notified of this information. Logging and alerting are supported for almost all BPEL activities.