Understanding the Application Integration Plug-In for BPM

In addition to the tools required to integrate your applications, WebLogic Integration also provides a powerful set of tools that enables you to achieve process-level integration among your applications. Chief among these business process management (BPM) tools is the WebLogic Integration Studio, a graphical user interface that allows business analysts to graphically construct and maintain business process workflows that integrate applications. The Studio is described in detail in Using the WebLogic Integration Studio.

The WebLogic Integration Studio and other BPM tools cannot work with application view services and events until you deploy the application integration plug-in. Once you deploy the plug-in, however, business analysts and other nonprogrammers can use the consistent, familiar interface provided by the Studio to invoke services and receive notification of events from workflows. For more information, see Configuring Workflow Resources in Using the WebLogic Integration Studio.

Use the WebLogic Integration functions and tools in the following order:

1. Establish application-level integration among all the applications in your enterprise, using the tools described in this document.

2. Develop adapters and define application views, using the tools described in this document.

3. Open the WebLogic Integration Studio and create business process workflows.

4. Incorporate your application view services and events with your workflows.

5. Deploy your workflows.

6. If you need to update existing workflows, adapters, services, or events, you can do so in the Studio. By making changes in this way, you can avoid time-consuming compiles, which are not required when you use the Studio.

For details about using the WebLogic Integration Studio to build business process workflows that include application view services and events, see Using Application Views in the Studio in Using Application Integration.