This chapter explores how Oracle SOA and Oracle BPM, in tandem, can help in enabling the success of enterprise-wide BPM. Together, they provide an enterprise computing - an end-to-end enterprise BPM offering.
In this chapter, you will explore the common integration approach in Oracle BPM. You will uncover how the BPM process invokes other processes and services, and how BPM processes get invoked. You will explore JMS queue-based auto invocation of BPM processes, how to expose the BPM process as a reusable service, how a BPM process can invoke other processes, and synchronous and asynchronous operations for services.
In this chapter, you will learn the following topics:
- Invoking an asynchronous service using message events
- Invoking a synchronous service using service task
- Calling a BPM process
- Initiating BPM from JMS
- Exposing the BPMN process as a service
BPM provides higher-level abstraction for defining businesses processes as well as other important capabilities of monitoring and managing those processes. Services provide the functions that support those processes.
SOA provides the ability for services to be combined together and to support and create an agile, flexible, and dynamic enterprise. Still, some interconnectivity and cohesiveness can be evolved if BPM and SOA are put together.
SOA will support the creation of reusable and reliable services for appropriate orchestration. These services are agile and reusable. An agile application is a loosely coupled set of services, it is easily modified to address changing business needs, and it is scalable by design. But without BPM your services will not have the ability of continuous improvement and optimizing themselves.
On the other hand, if BPM is employed without SOA in a business enterprise, application can be built in an organization, but that business organization will not be able to extend. BPM does not require SOA, as it can work alone, but SOA simplifies BPM implementation in a business organization. SOA provides a layer of control and governance for IT underneath BPM.
A common integration approach is Oracle BPM consuming OSB services, BPEL service, or any web services. Oracle BPM consuming synchronous and asynchronous operations of web service, BPEL services will be explored in this chapter. Just like any other web service, Oracle BPM can consume the proxy services that are exposed from Oracle Service Bus by providing the WSDL file to Oracle BPM process and having a web service object generated in your process's component catalog.
Similarly, there are cases when you need to expose Oracle BPM services to be consumed by BPEL, Mediator, and more specifically, by Oracle Service Bus. There are many ways by which Oracle BPM processes can be exposed as services, such as exposing Oracle BPM process as service or using JMS. Exposing a process as a web service is a built-in capability of Oracle BPM. Web services, such as BPEL/Mediator Service or OSB, can post messages on JMS queues, and Oracle BPM can subscribe to listen to those queues. A message on the queue will result in instance creation based on the incoming message.