|
WebLogic Server 8.1 Process Edition
Leveraging BPM to build asynchronous service-oriented applications
by Herain Oberoi
Posted May 24, 2004
BEA Systems announces the general availability of the latest edition of its application server: WebLogic Server 8.1 Process Edition.
At a high level, this new edition adds business process management (BPM), data transformation, and process monitoring capabilities to the application server, providing a robust platform for rapidly building asynchronous applications.
Requirements such as orchestrating Web services across an unreliable network, automating complex business processes that integrate with high latency systems, and extending these processes to the Web tier have made the need to easily build asynchronous systems even more important.
Asynchronous programming however, comes with its fair share of challenges. For instance, dealing with state management, message queuing, message correlation, long running transactions, and compensating actions are just some of the challenges a developer has to face while working with asynchrony.
Take for example, the requirements for the Web-based airline reservation system shown in Figures 1 and 2.
Although this is a relatively simplistic business process, closer examination of the requirements reveals a number of implementation and design challenges:
- In step 2, how would you interact in parallel, with multiple resources that have varying response times, and yet provide a result back to the client within a fixed interval?
- For multiple customer requests, how would you correlate a given system response with the correct instance of the client session?
- In steps 4 and 6, how would you ensure that you have maintained state for the client if a customer looses his/her connection after making a reservation, but before making a payment confirmation?
- What failover characteristics would your implementation have if there was a critical system failure between steps 4 and 6?
- Finally, what monitoring capabilities would you have in any given instance of this process so as to provide administrators with greater visibility into the process status?
These implementation and design challenges are repeatedly faced across all types of projects and are common to almost any IT organization trying to automate complex business processes using technologies that support asynchrony.
Over the past year, the convergence of a process-based paradigm for orchestrating business services with model view controller (MVC)-based Web applications has provided developers with a potent combination and an elegant architecture for rapidly building asynchronous Web applications (see Figure 3).
The fundamental concept is to delegate the complex implementation challenges that arise due to asynchrony such as state management, message correlation, data mapping, transactions, monitoring, and so forth to a well defined framework, enabling the developer to focus primarily on designing the process to be automated and to map the associated data to be exchanged. The resulting process and its individual components are also exposed as loosely coupled services allowing for a more adaptable architecture as requirements change over time.
This form of rapid application design and process automation is known as "process driven development" (see Resources). It is increasingly gaining popularity among application developers. Its elegant architectural model as well as its service-oriented nature has had a widespread appeal among architects.
WebLogic Server Process Edition enhances the application server with tools and technologies that overcome the challenges of asynchronous programming and support "process driven development." This ultimately allows for the easier orchestration of business services and the development of service-oriented applications leading to more adaptable and reusable architectures.
BEA Systems Inc.
2315 North First Street
San Jose, CA 95131
Tel: 800.817.4BEA; 408.570.8000
Fax: 408.570.8901
www.bea.com
About the Author
Herain is a Product Marketing Manager for BEA's Integration product lines.
Back to top
|