Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL: From Business Process Modeling to Orchestration and Service Oriented Architecture

329 Pages·2008·6.66 MB·English

by  Kapil Pant

Business Process Driven SOA
using BPMN and BPEL
From Business Process Modeling to Orchestration and
Service Oriented Architecture
Matjaz B. Juric
Kapil Pant
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL
Copyright © 2008 Packt Publishing
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First published: August 2008
Production Reference: 1220808
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-84719-146-5
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Vinayak Chittar ([email protected])
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Credits
Authors Project Manager
Matjaz B. Juric Abhijeet Deobhakta
Kapil Pant
Project Coordinator
Reviewer Patricia Weir
Frank Jennings
Indexer
Senior Acquisition Editor Monica Ajmera
Louay Fatoohi
Proofreader
Development Editor Dirk Manuel
Nikhil Bangera
Production Coordinator
Technical Editor Rajni Thorat
Aanchal A. Kumar
Cover Work
Copy Editor Rajni Thorat
Sumathi Sridhar
Editorial Team Leader
Akshara Aware
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Foreword
More and more organizations are turning to Business Process Management in
their quest for practical ways to create new business value and to streamline their
operations, and to ultimately become flexible, responsive and efficient organizations.
For the last 30 years, the business world has become more process aware, and BPM
has come a long way since initial iterations that relied heavily on static flowcharts to
map out corporate processes in mostly unchanging organizations.
Today, BPM has become a discipline in its own right. It applies sophisticated software
and best practices to model, simulate, automate, manage, and monitor processes, in
order to coordinate operations with dynamic business priorities. This has given rise
to unprecedented process flexibility and scalability, wherein workflows (both human
and automated) are determined in real-time by events and/or outcomes within the
process, and effective knowledge transfer is made possible as processes become
well-documented business artifacts on which employees can be trained.
The introduction of an independent process tier represents BPM's first major
contribution to business computing. It puts the management of business logic in the
hands of business managers, without threatening the integrity of the application logic.
To enjoy the full benefits of BPM, processes must integrate with existing applications
and systems. They require access to the functions that are locked in application silos.
Today's IT organization is complex, consisting of many different applications and
systems built using heterogeneous technologies, on various types of middleware,
using multiple databases and running on many platforms. Hard-coding point-to-point
integration with these applications is not a good solution as it creates tight coupling
with the application and makes the process brittle and inflexibleThis can make the
processes expensive to change and may therefore defeat the entire purpose of BPM.
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This is where Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) comes in. It provides the
technical ability to create that process independence. The goal of SOA is to expose
an organization's IT assets as re-usable services that can communicate and integrate
more readily. SOA's aim is to provide a common communication framework to
organize and describe the capabilities, usage policies and service provider locations
without exposing the implementation details. It allows organizations to plug in
new services or upgrade existing services in a granular fashion in order to address
new business requirements, while providing the possibility of making the services
consumable across different channels, and at the same time enabling existing legacy
applications as services. The goal is to eliminate the integration headache common to
many organizations today, while leveraging existing IT investments.
BPM and SOA are a natural match —together they facilitate the next phase of business
process automation, deriving higher value from services. Business automation will no
longer be about hard coding a function that is to be repeated infinitely.
Today, business automation through BPM and SOA is all about creating services that
are re-usable in many different ways, in multiple processes that can be continually
improved. Through this synergy, organizations will achieve better business and IT
results than were ever possible through either discipline alone.
This book provides adequate coverage of BPM in the context of SOA, as well as
a pragmatic approach to carrying out the analysis, execution and monitoring of
business processes from end-to-end, using Business Process Modeling Notation
(BPMN), and the automatic mapping of BPMN to the Business Process Execution
Language (BPEL) for executing business processes in SOA.
Geoffroy de Lamalle
Business Development Manager, SOA—Europe, Middle East & Africa,
IDS Scheer AG
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About the Authors
Matjaz B. Juric holds a Ph.D. in computer and information science. He is Associate
Professor at the University of Maribor and the director of Science Park project. In
addition to this book, he has authored or coauthored SOA Approach to Integration,
Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (English and French editions),
BPEL Cookbook: Best Practices for SOA-based integration and composite applications
development, Professional J2EE EAI, Professional EJB, J2EE Design Patterns Applied,
and .NET Serialization Handbook. He has published chapters in More Java Gems
(Cambridge University Press) and in Technology Supporting Business Solutions (Nova
Science Publishers). He has also published articles in journals and magazines, such
as SOA World Journal, Web Services Journal, Java Developer's Journal, Java Report,
Java World, eai Journal, theserverside.com, OTN, ACM journals, and has presented at
conferences such as OOPSLA, Java Development, XML Europe, OOW, SCI, and
others. He is a reviewer, program committee member, and conference organizer.
Matjaz has been involved in several large-scale projects. He has been a consultant
for several large companies on SOA projects. In cooperation with the IBM Java
Technology Centre, he worked on performance analysis and optimization of
RMI-IIOP, an integral part of the Java platform. Matjaz is also a member of the
BPEL Advisory Board.
Matjaz is the chair of SOA Competency Centre, and the author of courses and
consultant for the BPEL and SOA consulting company BPELmentor.com. For more
information, please visit http://www.bpelmentor.com/
My efforts in this book are dedicated to my family. Special thanks
to my dear beautiful Ana. Thanks to my friends at Packt Publishing
and University of Maribor and to Ales Frece.
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Kapil Pant is an accomplished BPM consultant and Public speaker with extensive
experience in Products and Professional Services consulting. He currently
manages Wipro Technologies' BPM/SOA practice in Europe, and leads consulting
engagements including Business Process Improvement workshops, BPMS and
SOA Tools Study and Recommendations, and BPM Architecture, Implementation
and Governance.
Over the years, Kapil has been extensively involved in conducting successful
workshops on Process Improvement, Requirements Analysis, BPM/SOA and
Enterprise Architecture for clients in Telecom, Banking, Securities and Insurance
industry verticals. He has also worked closely with leading System Integrators such
as Wipro, Tata Consulting, HCL and Satyam to conduct technology enablement
programs for client projects across industry verticals.
As a recognized Public Speaker, Kapil is known for his well-researched programs
delivered in his high-energy, enthusiastic, and down-to-earth style. He has presented
keynote speeches, workshops, seminars, and over 40 road-shows across the Asia
Pacific, Europe and the USA. He was also nominated by the Government of India
to lead seminars as a part of a 25-member working committee for E-Governance
Enterprise Architecture and Standards Taxonomy.
He has a Masters Degree in Computer Applications, a Bachelors Degree in Business
Studies, and a TOGAF Certification.
Kapil presently lives in Hampshire, UK with his wife and enjoys blogging in his
free time.
I would like to express my thanks to my colleagues in Wipro
Technologies, specifically my senior colleagues Gopalakrishna
Byllahalli and Gunendra Patil for their firm support, guidance and
encouragement.

Ashish Sharma for his technical understanding and help with some
of the key sections in the book.

Louay Fatoohi and Patricia Weir from Packt Publishing for their
continued support, patience and understanding during the course of
this project.

Finally, I am grateful to my parents and grandmother for their
blessings and my wife Ekta for her constant encouragement
and critical advice without which this book would not have
been possible.
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About the Reviewer
Frank Jennings works in the Information Products Group of Sun Microsystems
Inc. He has more than 9 years of experience in Java, SOA and System Design.
He is an Electronics Engineer from Madras University and has worked for several
open-source projects.
Frank has written regular columns for leading Java journals including Java
Developer's Journal and Linux Developer's Week. Frank is also the co-author of the
book SOA Approach to Integration focusing on SOA design pattern for enterprises.
Frank also is involved in technical publications for Sun Microsystems in the fields of
Solaris and Developer AMP Stack. His blog can be read at http://blogs.sun.com/
phantom and he can be reached at [email protected]. He also holds a Post Graduate
Diploma in Computer Science and an Advance Diploma in Computer Integrated
Management from University of Indianapolis
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: SOA and Business Processes 5
Why Care about Business Processes? 7
Examples of Business Processes 8
How Business Processes Emerge 11
How Business Processes and IT Relate 12
IT Flexibility 13
Heterogeneous Architecture 14
Traditional Software Lifecycles 16
Why Do We Need SOA? 16
Why Should We Believe This? 17
SOA Approach to Business Processes 19
Major Improvements in the SOA Approach 21
Focus on Content, Not Technology 24
Management Support 25
SOA Competency Centre 26
SOA Inception 26
SOA Forces 28
Value of SOA for IT Departments 29
Changes in the Development Approach 30
Reduced Complexity 32
Technical Introduction to SOA 32
BPMN 34
BPEL 34
Features 36
Services 36
Service Interfaces 38
Messages 38
Synchronicity 38
Loose Coupling 39