ActiveBPEL® Designer User’s Guide
The ActiveVOS product family is built from the ground up to support the creation, testing, deployment and execution of composite business applications. The ActiveVOS, a visual orchestration system (VOS), is currently available in one of three forms.
ActiveBPEL Community Edition includes Active Endpoints' open source ActiveBPEL Community Edition Engine and the ActiveBPEL Community Edition Designer, an Eclipse-based development environment. Community Edition allows you to learn about the OASIS Web Services Business Process Execution Language v2.0 (WS-BPEL 2.0) standard and the BPEL4People and WS-Human Task specifications.
ActiveVOS Professional Edition provides a project team everything it needs to easily model, build, simulate, test and deploy standards-based composite applications. Enhanced connectivity and identity integration support coupled with expanded server capabilities make it easy to visually orchestrate processes that include human tasks across your organization and among partners. Rich productivity tools and advanced wizards make it easy for developers to adapt applications quickly, leverage their existing skills and free business logic from proprietary workflow engines.
ActiveVOS Enterprise Edition builds on top of the functionality delivered by the Professional Edition. ActiveVOS Enterprise Edition easily scales to meet the needs of enterprises of any size and can be incorporated rapidly into your production J2EE execution environment.
Developers, using the same familiar development environment of Professional Edition, are able to scale applications to meet rigorous performance or throughput requirements.
In contrast with monolithic systems architectures of the past, VOS applications are based on a services-oriented composite application model which incorporates service-service, service-human, and human-human interaction. A VOS application incorporates as one: people, process and services. The interfaces to all application participants are described using standard services conventions (in particular, Web Services Description Language, or WSDL to describe service interfaces and WS-Human Task for incorporating people), and then components are woven into coherent process orchestrations using BPEL and BPEL for People. In addition to incorporating Web service technologies, ActiveVOS makes it simple to incorporate services that expose REST or JAVA interfaces or transports such as JMS or SOAP/HTTP. In short, ActiveVOS provides you with the means by which you build your composite business applications.
The goal of a VOS is to deliver highly adaptive business applications that evolving to user needs.
A hypothetical VOS application might automate purchase order management:
Until recently, the information technology community has lacked the necessary standards and technologies to build VOS 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) and BPEL for People. In a nutshell, BPEL defines the standard constructs and semantics required to implement complex orchestrations. BPEL for People adds human workflow capabilities.
Although BPEL is a very rich notation for describing VOS applications, it is arduous and error-prone to write by hand. Fortunately, you do not have to!
Using ActiveVOS, you can model, build, simulate, test and deploy standards-based composite applications quickly and easily. ActiveVOS' visual interfaces allow you to focus on describing the "big picture" of your applications, not the coding minutia. With ActiveVOS you drag and drop activities, declare behavior through policies, and deploy into production fully operational and scalable composite business applications.
ActiveVOS Designer is a visual environment for creating, testing and deploying BPEL/BPEL for People-based orchestrations. 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, human roles, and define how data flows among those entities.
As you organize icons on the Process Editor canvas, ActiveVOS automatically constructs valid BPEL/BPEL for People XML constructs. ActiveVOS handles all of the coding and runtime chores for you. And once you have defined your composite application and its orchestration of services and people, ActiveVOS allows you to visually simulate its execution using your own sample data which you can record as individual unit tests that can be assembled together to form a regression test suite to validate changes in the future. Using ActiveVOS, you can define sophisticated, bullet-proof orchestrations in the shortest possible time frames and deploy these in confidence.
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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