Integrating AquaLogic BPM Suite 6.0 and AquaLogic Service Bus

by Alex Toussaint
07/11/2007

Abstract

AquaLogic BPM Suite 6.0 (ALBPM) is planned for release in July 2007. Ever since ALBPM 5.5, customers have been able to integrate and work with AquaLogic Service Bus (ALSB). In this article we review new features that optimize the work between the ALBPM and ALSB, making the integration faster and more seamless and transparent.

ALBPM은 2007년 7월에 릴리즈되기로 계획되었다.

Introduction

The new AquaLogic BPM Suite 6.0 has several new features to improve business efficiency and enterprise scalability. A complete list of new features will be made available by the time the product launches next month. Here is a summary of some of the main highlights:

• A new version of AquaLogic BPM Studio based on Eclipse (see Figure 1 for an example of the new version)
• A new version of AquaLogic BPM WorkSpace based on JSF
• Support for BPEL 2.0 and XPDL 2.0
• Enhanced business rules support
• New decision activities
• A new WorkSpace extension for JSF, ALUI, and RSS
• Optimized integration with AquaLogic Service Bus
• Two-way custom transport for AquaLogic Service Bus
• Support for WS-Security User Name Token Profile
• A new Configuration Wizard for WebLogic Server
• Improved J2EE deployment of Engine and Projects
• Several usability enhancements

In this article, the main focus will be on the integration work with the AquaLogic Service Bus. The three main goals were:

• Making the consumption and publication of services absolutely simple
• Providing a native authentication mechanism used with the bus
• Improving communication performance by means of the custom transport

In doing so, the integration allows for very seamless work between the products. The ability to seamlessly combine the intelligent routing and management of the bus with business process capabilities is critical for service orchestration (see Figure 1).

The rest of this article shows these improvements in action.

Seamless Integration

In ALBPM 6.0, you can easily connect to any instances of ALSB 2.6, as shown on Figure 2. The product brings a new Introspector wizard that allows users to quickly connect the two products together in a matter of seconds. In just a few clicks you can establish a connection with the bus and gain access to all its proxy services.

It is no longer necessary to log into the bus console to get a list of all available services. Users also don't need to worry about working with WSDL files and trying to guess the URL for a particular services. Everything is available directly from AquaLogic BPM Studio environment, as illustrated in Figure 3.

Once a service is selected, it becomes part of the ALBPM catalog. It can then be used easily by any business process that may be required by that service. Figure 4 shows how the LoanGateway service from the sample project that comes with ALSB 2.6 is being called from a business process.

On the other hand, after a business process is created, it can quickly be exposed as a service and registered with bus. This can also be done directly from AquaLogic BPM Studio, as shown in Figure 5a.

You can also do that from the runtime AquaLogic Process Administrator, as shown in Figure 5b.

Once a process is registered with ALSB, it will become visible in the Project Explorer, as shown in Figure 6. Different users can also make use of the newly exposed service. Again, the main goal was to make it easy to get services to and from ALSB from ALBPM. All the required infrastructure work managing WSDLs and all required registration processes have been automated so that users can focus on the business problem they are trying to solve.

Once a business process is published, it becomes available in the AquaLogic BPM Workspace, as shown in Figure 7. This is one of the Web-based entry points for business users to interact with their processes. In this case, a business process is calling the sample loan application inside ALSB 2.6. The service is part of a business process and can be called directly from the workspace without the need for complex interaction or any knowledge of the bus infrastructure.

The ability to go back and fourth between services in ALBPM and ALSB is critical for orchestration. Users can take advantage of both XPDL 2.0 and BPEL 2.0 to model their business processes, and with just a few clicks they can invoke services and register a business process as a service.

Native Security

The majority of authentication requests in ALSB are made via the WS-Security Username Token Profile, as shown in Figure 8. The ALBPM 6.0 release provides native support to WS-Security. This enables business processes to talk directly with ALSB and vice versa, exchanging credentials through a common format. There is no need to massage credential types to match one another. For the next major release of ALBPM, post-6.0, a few other token flavors are under exploration based on customer demand.

Faster Communication

In ALSB 2.6, a new transport infrastructure has been made available for other applications to customize the communication with the bus. The new version of ALBPM provides both inbound and outbound transports for ALSB. In addition to the improvement in communication performance over time, new capabilities include transaction propagation and the ability to exchange more complex security context.

Figure 9 shows how users can select a transport type inbound to ALSB. Processes calling services inside ALSB would benefit from a faster RMI over T3 protocol communication instead of a typical Web services request.

Figure 10 shows how users can configure a transport type outbound from ALSB. Applications that may need to call a business process as a service registered with ALSB can also benefit from the optimized communication transport.

Communication performance between the two products continues to be optimized. Future releases will aim for faster throughput and minimizing latency across process calls. Better communication performance between ALSB and ALBPM is available when both products are installed on the same machine (making use of the same JVM), using the custom transport. In some cases, we have seen a 30-percent improvement in performance. Using the custom transport in the same JVM allows communication to bypass the use of sockets and serialization that is required during normal communication. ALBPM and ALSB can also be deployed separately, but then performance is dependent on network performance.

Summary

AquaLogic BPM Suite 6.0 provides several exciting new features. Some of them include the optimized integration with AquaLogic Service Bus. This integration features: the ability to register and invoke services directly to and from ALSB without having to deal with WSDLs; support for native security by means of WS-Security Username Token Profile; and the availability of a new custom transport to improve communication performance between the two products. Customers will be able to leverage orchestration capabilities more easily from ALBPM and will also benefit from all the management, routing, and SLA capabilities in ALSB.

References

• Visit the AquaLogic Service Bus and AquaLogic BPM Suite product centers for more articles and blogs

출처 : http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2007/07/aqualogic-bpm-servicebus.html?page=1