WebLogic Server Process Edition Overview

Business Process Management: Process Driven Services

WebLogic Server Process Edition allows you to model and execute business processes that span multiple internal systems, external resources, and users. From the business process management (BPM) perspective, the enterprise is a set of business services that are accessed through controls that can be orchestrated to model a business process. Business processes allow you to orchestrate the execution of business logic and the exchange of business documents among back-end systems, users, and trading partners (systems and users) in a loosely coupled fashion.

The following sections provide further information on BPM and the Web services available as business process resources:

Business Process Management Overview

The business process engine enables you to easily create a graphical representation of your business process, allowing you to focus on the application logic rather than on implementation details. You create a graph of component nodes in your business process by dragging components from the Business Process Palette and dropping them onto the Design View pane. Program control is represented visually by these nodes (or shapes) and the connections between them. Effectively, you create a graphical representation of your business process and its interactions with clients and resources, such as databases, JMS queues, file systems, and other components. The following figure provides an example of the visual business process editor.

Figure 3-1 Visual Business Process Editor

Visual Business Process Editor

As you build a business process, WebLogic Workshop writes source code to a business process file (a JPD file).

For more information on building business processes, see Guide to Building Business Processes in Building Integrated Applications in the WebLogic Workshop Help.

Business Process Management Features

The following table details the key features of WebLogic Server Process Edition business process management (BPM).

Table 3-2 BPM Key Features

Feature	Description
Unified access to resources through Controls	This enables you to view business activities as services and model the business process to orchestrate integration and automation. Business processes seamlessly interact with users, applications, back-end resources, and resources inside and outside the firewall.
New simplified structured business processes	The new simplified structure provides XML for the business process flow and Java for the operations.
Graphical business process editing for high-level integration scenarios	This allows you to carry out message-based, transformation routing. As the business processes are Java classes, the business process (JPD) files also contain the metadata that describes the business process logic. Additionally, you can perform two-way editing.
Support for Java code in business process nodes	You are only a click away from Java coding.
Support for synchronous and asynchronous business process invocations	Messages (including synchronous starts) can be sent from external Java clients via Remote Method Invocation (RMI).
Process implementation optimization for performance	The following processes are supported: Stateless synchronous Stateless asynchronous Stateful asynchronous

Web Services Available as Business Process Resources

WebLogic Server Process Edition leverages Web services, asynchronous communication, and XML messaging at the platform level. You can use these services across internal and external integrations to simplify development and integration of loosely coupled and asynchronous applications.

WebLogic Server Process Edition features native support for Web services, including Web service security and reliable messaging. You can invoke Web services from within a WebLogic Server Process Edition business process. You can also expose business processes as a Web service and make them available as resources to other applications and application components. The following figure shows a Web service invoked from a business process.

Figure 3-3 Web Services Invoked from a Business Process

Web Services Invoked from a Business Process

For more information on Web services, see Getting Started with Web Services in Building Web Services in the WebLogic Workshop Help.

Building a Business Process

WebLogic Server Process Edition's business process management (BPM) functionality enables the integration of diverse applications and human participants, as well as the coordinated exchange of information between trading partners outside of the enterprise. Business Processes allow you to orchestrate the execution of business logic and the exchange of business documents among back-end systems, users, and trading partners (systems and users) in a loosely coupled fashion.

The first step in the design of your business process is to build a graphical representation of the business process that meets the business requirements for your project. You create a graph of component nodes in your business process by dragging components from the Business Process Palette and dropping them onto the Design View pane. Program control is represented visually by these nodes (or shapes) and the connections between them. Effectively, you create a graphical representation of your business process and its interactions with clients and resources, such as databases, JMS queues, file systems, and other components.

For more information, see Guide to Building Business Processes in Building Integrated Applications in the WebLogic Workshop Help.

Stateful and Stateless Processes

There are two types of business processes; Stateful and Stateless. A Stateful process is a business process which is compiled into an entity bean and runs within the scope of one or more JTA transactions. A Stateless process is a business process which is compiled into a Stateless session bean and runs within one JTA transaction. By default, a business process is Stateless until you add a blocking construct to the data flow, i.e. add a process that affects a transaction boundary. For more information about transaction boundaries, see Transaction Boundaries in the Guide to Building Business Process in the WebLogic Workshop Help.

The following sections provide more information on Stateful and Stateless processes:

Stateless Processes

Stateless processes support business scenarios that involve short-running logic and have high performance requirements. A Stateless process is optimized for lower-latency, higher-performance execution because it does not persist its state to a database. For example, a Stateless process is one that receives a message asynchronously from a client, transforms the message, and then sends it asynchronously to a resource using a control. Another example is a process that starts with a message broker subscription, transforms a message, and publishes it to another message broker channel. Such a process is analogous to the kinds of routing rules used by traditional message brokering or message routing systems.

For information on working with variables in a Stateless process, see Building Stateless and Stateful Business Processes in Guide to Building Business Processes in the WebLogic Workshop Help.

Stateful Processes

Stateful processes support business scenarios that involve complex, long-running logic and therefore have specific reliability and recovery requirements. A process is made Stateful by the addition of Stateful nodes or logic that forces transaction boundaries. For more information on transaction boundaries, see Transaction Boundaries in the Guide to Building Business Process in the WebLogic Workshop Help.

For example, a process that receives a message, transforms it, sends it to a business partner, and then waits for an asynchronous response is Stateful because the act of waiting forces a transaction boundary. This is necessary to ensure that:

The process can recover and continue execution without loss of data in the event of a system outage during this waiting period.
System resources are used efficiently during this waiting period.

For information on working with variables in a Stateful process, see Building Stateless and Stateful Business Processes in Guide to Building Business Processes in the WebLogic Workshop Help.

Determining if your Business Process is Stateful or Stateless

The Start node Property Editor displays whether a business process is Stateless or Stateful. If a process is Stateless, the Property Editor displays the message "Stateless = True" and the Start node icon displays the icon. If a process is Stateful, the Property Editor displays the message "Stateless = False" and the Start node icon displays the icon.