ActiveBPEL® Designer User’s Guide
The ActiveBPEL product family is built from the ground up to support the creation, testing, deployment and execution of composite software applications. In contrast with monolithic systems architectures of the past, composite applications are based on a services-oriented computing model. The interfaces to all application components are described using standard services conventions (in particular, Web Services Description Language, or WSDL), and then components are woven into coherent process "compositions". The goal of composite applications is to deliver an information architecture that is highly adaptive to evolving user needs.
A hypothetical process composition might automate purchase order management:
Until recently, the information technology community has lacked the necessary standards and technologies to build composite applications such as the one above in an efficient, repeatable, scalable manner. A critical standard has recently emerged to address many of these challenges: Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). In a nutshell, BPEL defines the standard constructs and semantics required to implement complex services-oriented application compositions.
Although BPEL is a very rich notation for describing process compositions, it is arduous and error-prone to write by hand. Fortunately, you do not have to! Using ActiveBPEL, you can build, test and deploy standard, BPEL-based process compositions quickly and easily. ActiveBPEL’s visual interfaces allow you to focus on describing the "big picture" of your applications, not the coding minutia.
ActiveBPEL automatically handles all of the BPEL coding chores for you. And once you have defined your BPEL processes, ActiveBPEL allows you to visually simulate their execution using your own sample data. Using ActiveBPEL, you can define sophisticated, bullet-proof process compositions in the shortest possible time frames.
ActiveBPEL Designer (Designer, for short) is a visual environment for creating, testing and deploying BPEL-based process compositions. Designer frees you from the tedious, error-prone chores of writing BPEL by hand. Using Designer, you build processes by choosing partners, services and operations, and defining how data flows among those entities. As you organize icons on the Process Editor canvas, ActiveBPEL constructs valid BPEL (XML) for you.
Here is a typical picture of an ActiveBPEL BPEL process.
Here is a snippet of the BPEL code corresponding to the illustration above, as generated by ActiveBPEL Designer.
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