Web Service Orchestration Basics

The IDE's BPEL Designer provides a highly graphical environment for authoring, deploying and testing web-service centric business processes. This is often called web service orchestration and is one of the keystones of service-oriented architecture (SOA). A BPEL process can be thought of as a logical aggregator and coordinator of web services. In such a process, a collection of partner web-service components can collaborate synchronously or asynchronously, participate in long-lived conversations, and support fault handling. Thus, the IDE's BPEL Designer feature extends the power of service-oriented architecture.

The BPEL modeling environment includes deployment runtime, and the ability to author, edit, test-run, and debug BPEL processes. The BPEL Designer feature lets you use drag-and-drop functionality to create visual diagrams of business processes to orchestrate web services. The BPEL Designer feature supports two-way round-trip engineering of processes that are expressed in the Web Services Business Process Execution Language Version 2.0 (WS-BPEL 2.0, or generically, BPEL).

In the BPEL Designer, you can create a business diagram in the visual Design view or manipulate source code in the Source view. The BPEL source code and its visual diagram are always kept in sync.

Typical Tasks in Business Process Development

In the BPEL Designer, you can perform the following tasks to develop a business process. These tasks might iterate, and sometimes the order of tasks changes.

  1. Use the New Project wizard to create a new BPEL Module project and a Composite Application project.
  2. Create or import BPEL process files into the BPEL Module project.
  3. Create or import WSDL resources to act as partner services in your business process.
  4. Import XML schema resources.
  5. Add elements to the business process diagram and further define them by using property editors, custom editors, and pop-up menu options.
  6. Add to the source code of the BPEL, WSDL, and XSD files.
  7. Build a BPEL Module project.
  8. Add a BPEL project as a JBI Module to the Composite Application project.
  9. Deploy the Composite Application project to the BPEL Service Engine runtime.
  10. Test-run BPEL processes by sending sample messages to the deployed process.
  11. Debug deployed business processes.

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