Situational applications are developed by end users to solve day-to-day problems in the business scenario. The demand for this type of application is increasing since IT departments usually are not able to delivery it in agile way. Traditional software development processes do not have the agility and simplicity to fulfill the requirements of this type of application. This presentation presents a proposal of architecture for situational application generation using BPM, SOA and Mashup.

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Generation of Situational Applications
from Business Process Models
Flávio Faria1, Leonardo Guerreiro Azevedo1,2, Flavia Maria Santoro1
{flavio.faria, azevedo, flavia.santoro}@uniriotec.br; LGA@br.ibm.com
1Graduate Program in Informatics (PPGI)
Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO)
2IBM Resesarch Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
IBM Research – Brazil
established June 2010
Mission: To be known for our science and technology and vital
to IBM, Brazil, our clients in the region and worldwide
view from Rio de Janeiro Lab

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Outline
 Situational Applications
 Motivation
 Context of this work: SOA and BPM
 Proposal
 Architecture Overview
 Architecture components and implementation
 Conclusion

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Situational Applications
 Situational Applications are indicated to solve immediate and short-lived problems
in the business scenario
– Correspond to features not provided by an existing software
– Support a large spectrum of real applications, example
• Vacation planning
• Seminar management
• Research evaluation domain
• Crisis caused by natural disaster
– Usually developed by end user

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Motivation
 Traditional software development methods and techniques do not fulfill situational
application requirements
 Challenges
– Assist end users to develop their own application
– Usually situational application features are required by a small group of employees
 Example: situational application developed during Katrina Hurricane to planning
relief supplies logistics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xB0psBjpjI

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Context of this work
 Presents an architecture for situational application development combining
– BPM (Business Process Management)
– SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture)
 SOA and BPM alignment
– An important strategy to reduce the gap between business and IT (Neubauer, 2009)
 Services
– Self-contained computational elements, platform independents that supports
composition to develop new applications (Papazoglou et al., 2007)

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Activity 2
System 1
Cluster 3 Cluster 3
Business
requirement 2
Electronic document 1Electronic document 1
Organizational elements & Appl...
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Organizatio
nal unit 1
Application
system type 1
Start
event
Activity 1 Activity 2
Activity 3
Activity 5
Activity 4
Intermedi
ate event
1
Intermedi
ate event
2
Intermedi
ate event
4
Intermedi
ate event
3
End event
Organizational elements & Appl...
Carriesout&SupportsCarriesout&SupportsCarriesout&SupportsCarriesout&SupportsCarriesout&SupportsCarriesout&SupportsCarriesout&SupportsCarriesout&SupportsCarriesout&Supports&Supports
Application
system type 1
Start
event
Activity 1
Activity 2 Activity 3 End event
Application
system type 2
Process
interface 1
Process 1
Subprocess 1 Subprocess 2 Subprocess 3 Subprocess 4
SOA and BPM
Activity 1
System 1
Cluster 1
Cluster 2
Cluster 2
Business
rule 1
Business
requirement 1
Database
1
Database
1
BusinessprocessviewServiceview

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Main contribution
 Proposal
– Present a mashup solution that combines existing concepts and technologies to
create a tool that support situational appliation generation
 Logic is generated from a business process model control flow
 Solution handles
– Data transformation
– Data mapping
– Service composition
– Application running
– End-user oriented
 Main challenge
– Reduce/Eliminate technical knowledge in order non-programming users can create
situational applications

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Architecture Overview

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Architecture components

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Architecture components
External Service Module: Integrates the
generated application to external services
Execution Module: Run the generated application

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Architecture components
 SIP (or PIS – Process Import Service)
– Extracts information from business
process models
 SEP (or PEX – Process Export Service)
– Discovers the services that meet user
requirements
 SGA (or AGS – Application Generation Service)
– Generates the application using
extracted information from BP
– Data mapping is performed using BP
activities input and output data
 SIA (or ADS – Application Deployment Service)
– Automates deployment
• Compilation, Build and Deployment
 RDA (or ADR – application data repository)
– Stores internal information and
information required to access external
services

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Architecture Implementation
 Implementation using a Service-Oriented Approach
 Each module has a set of web services
– Java language, JAX-WS, JAXB, XML, XSD, WSDL
 BPMN as process modeling notation
– Simple notation to consider SOA (Weske, 2007)
– Business users understand the notation (Ko et al., 2009)
– It allows mapping to an execution language (Ko et al., 2009)
 XPDL (XML Process Definition Language) as BP representation format
– Main standard for BP information exchange (Ko et al., 2009)
– Process Import Service extracts business process information from a XPDL file
– Workflow patterns (van deer Aalst et al., 2003) are used to identify process constructs
 UBL (Universal Business Language) for service identification (Souza e Rabelo, 2010)
 EMML (Enterprise Mashup Markup Language) as process execution language
– Standard for mashup application development (Capiello et al., 2011)
 Application is generated following a MVC approach
– Data manipulation, Controller, and Web pages

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Data: 01/06/2014
Example of a Situational Application
 Scenario: Research evaluation application to measure the quality of researches
performance (adapted from Daniel et al., 2012). The idea is illustrate with a demo
application using the proposed architecture.
 Application flow:
1. List IS researches;
2. For each research, get publications;
3. Calculate the performance index based on Qualis system (QUALIS: A = 1 (high);
B = 0.5 (medium); C = 0 (low);
4. Generate an aplication based on business process model control flow.
http://www.bizagi.com/

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 This is the main service of the architecture and it is responsible for serialize the
process flow structures
– XPDL heuristics perform control flow recognition and bind to Java objects
– Create the process instance and load
– Discovery and bind services based on UBL ontology
– Start the control flow recognition (graph, node, tasknode…)
Step 1: Import Business Process Model

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Step 1: Import Business Process Model

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Step 2: Transform Process
 Transform the process to the executable format and generate the service
composition….
– Generate EMML composition
– Create a new mashup instance
– Marshalling the mashup object to EMML format

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Step 3: Generate the application
 Generate the application in runtime
– Generate the application based on the services contained in the composition
– Java MVC class are created using Java reflection API and Javassist library
– Design patterns as Template method, Abstract Factory, Facade are being used to
guarantee the abstraction level necessary to generate the app
– Deploy and execute the application in the runtime engines

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Conclusion
 Contributions
– Provide a high-level service oriented architecture for situational application
generation from business processes models by end user
– Implementation and integration details of the solution that would contribute for
situation application development
 Future work
– Finish the implementation
– Perform an evaluation in real scenarios

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Generation of Situational Applications
from Business Process Models
Flávio Faria1, Leonardo Guerreiro Azevedo1,2, Flavia Maria Santoro1
{flavio.faria, azevedo, flavia.santoro}@uniriotec.br; LGA@br.ibm.com
1Graduate Program in Informatics (PPGI)
Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO)
2IBM Resesarch Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
IBM Research – Brazil
established June 2010
Mission: To be known for our science and technology and vital
to IBM, Brazil, our clients in the region and worldwide
view from Rio de Janeiro Lab
Thank you! Questions?

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Backup slides

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Ingredients for situational application development
 High-level application specification and modeling suitable for business-to-end user
approach
 Capabilities to integrate information provided by different sources and service
composition technologies
 Support service lightweight orchestration based on the business processes and
workflow
 Drive end users without programming skills in designing the application
composition logic by re-using existing components
 Agile software development processes to simplicity and fulfill the requirements of
situational application

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Situational Application Requirements
End-user Requirements
• Non-programmer
• User friendly
• Simple and graphical
modeling language
• Solve immediate
business needs…
Business Requirements
• Reduce costs
• Increase ROI & profit
• Productivity & agility
• On-demand...
Software Development
Requirements
• Requirement
Traceability
• Solution design
• Coding & tests
• SCM
• Integration...
Situational
Application

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Import
Process
• Serializes process structures (tasks,
events and gateways).
• Simple API for BPMN serialization using
Java objects.
• Mapping from BPMN to Java is based on
XPDL standard.
Transform
Process
• Transform process into executable language.
• The transformation is based on the workflow
patterns.
• Handle the composition logic converting process
elements to an executable language (EMML).
• UDDI service discovery and binding capability
Generate
Application
• Implement the application generation
logic based on EMML composition.
• Generate the structural Java class using
MVC architectural pattern.
• Automatic build and deploy the
application in the runtime engines.
Architecture Overview