Business Process Management
for SOA & Mashups
Milinda Pathirage
Product Manager, WSO2 BPS, WSO2 Inc.
milinda@wso2.com

Summary
Business Processes
BPM and SOA
Modeling Business Processes
Mashups

Building a Better Business
Every one's goals
 Reduce costs
 Improve responsiveness
 Improve reliability
 Increase agility and flexibility
 Decrease overall risks

Why Business Processes Matter
What is business process?
 A method or system for achieving a commercial result
 It describes how enterprises performs its business functions
 Any well-defined interaction between systems and people,
triggered by events, using logical decision points, and with
clearly defined flows
 To achieve the business goals, need to continuously
optimize your processes

Business Process Example

Business Process Management
Management model or framework that helps or-
ganizations to manage their business process-
es while optimizing and leveraging IT assets
Is about improving business
BPM Life Cycle

SOA and BPM
SOA is an architectural style for developing dis-
tributed system
BPM provides the bridge between business goals
and IT solutions
SOA needs the service coordination and orches-
tration provided by BPM
BPM needs SOA to deliver business-user access
to the data and functionality housed in other en-
terprise systems

BPM and SOA
BPM
Long running coordination state
SOA
Stateless Service Interactions
Applications, Databases, Legacy
Persistent application state

Modeling Business Processes
BPMN
 Standard for business process modeling
 Provides graphical notation for specifying business processes
Executable business process modeling
 XPDL
 YAWL
 EPML
 BPEL4WS 1.1
 WS- BPEL 2.0 (Industry standard)
 BPELScript (JavaScript like language)

Business Processes in SOA
Web services are the preferred standards-based
way to realize SOA
BPEL can be used for composition, orchestra-
tion or coordination of Web services
BPEL fill the gap between BPM and SOA
BPEL in your SOA
 Business process from services and human activities
 Coarse grained business services from fine grained services
 Flow based integration of various existing applications

WS-BPEL 2.0
XML based language for the specification of Executable
and Abstract business processes
Extends the Web Services interaction model and en-
ables it to support business processes
BPEL support distributed transactions
BPEL is the standard used by major BPM vendors (IBM,
Oracle, Apache ODE, WSO2, Intalio)
Xpath, XSLT and Xquery for XML data manipulation

WS-BPEL Example

Why use BPEL instead of Java?
Managed execution
 Monitor the progress of the process
 Start, stop, suspend, resume process instances
Structured approach to long running processes
 Easy to build processes that can be suspended, resumed and interact with sys-
tems in asynchronous patters
Excellent support for transactions and compensation
 Implement clear logic that which deals with problems in long-running processes
Visualizing the flows helps communication between the spon-
sors and implementors
None of this is impossible in Java – you could use a framework to gain these
benefits - But BPEL has it all in a simple package

Human Interactions in BPEL
Many business process scenarios require human interac-
tions
With pure BPEL you can interact with people
 But you have to the integration work
Two new specs which standardize the human interactions
 WS-Human Tasks
 BPEL4People
Advance human interaction patterns
 4-Eyes principal
 Escalation
 Nomination
 Chained execution

BPEL4People Model

When to Use BPEL
Orchestrate a business process with complex
logic
Long-running business process where state is
maintained and human interactions are in-
volved

Mashups

What is a mashup?
Term originates in music – remix of existing
music into something new and unique
Uses the existing data (tracks) as they are
found
Enabled and popularized by technological in-
novation, lowering cost and skills for entry

Mashups in IT
Remix of existing data (usually Internet) into
something new and unique
Uses the existing data (web pages, web ser-
vices, feeds) as they are found

Mashup Long-tail Scenarios
Bridging domains
 Mining data from Web pages
 Processing events
Aggregation/correlation
Reporting
 Reports & visualizations
 Notifications
 Dashboards
Customization/personalization
Decision “Agents”
Periodic tasks
Monitoring conditions

What technological innovation?
Emergence of readily accessible information
sources (the Internet, enterprise SOA, desktop
data)
Standard formats and protocols
Mashup platforms and tools
 Lower the barriers to entry
 Lower the cost of each project

Components of a Mashup Plat-
form
Ability
to simply access a wide variety of infor-
mation sources
 Web services
 Feeds
 Scraped web pages
 Files
 Email
 Instant messages and other event sources
Logic language
 Graphical designer
 Declarative language
 Scripting language
 Programming language
Tradeoffs- list increases in power, decreases in
accessibility

Components of a Mashup Plat-
form
Providing or presenting output
 Machine readable
 Web services
 Feeds
 Database/File system writes
 Human readable
 Web pages
 Widgets/Gadgets
 Feeds
 Email
 Instant messages/SMS

WSO2 Mashup Server Architec-
ture
Data
Sources
Web Pages
Mashup
Feeds
Logic
Web Services

WSO2 Mashup Server Architec-
ture
Javascript (E4X)
 Simple service
deployment
 Service composition
Mashup  Workflows
Logic  Service translation
 Service UI building
 Rapid prototyping

WSO2 Mashup Server Architec-
ture
Web
Mashup Services
Logic Rich
HTML
Applications
Emails/IM
Files
Feeds

Why use Mashup instead of
BPEL?
Lighter weight
Rapid development
Broader developer base
Broader definition of “services”
Typically serves end users

Mashups vs BPEL
Services are not always defined by traditional
“service interfaces”
Business processes drive demand for a rich
ecosystem of services
Mashups & BPM both consume and provide
services
Development time and effort are important fac-
tors in choosing the right approach