BPEL4WS and IDIOM Decision Suite
One of the key features of the IDIOM Decision Suite is the flexibility in the runtime deployment of the IDIOM decisions and formulas. Deploying IDIOM within a business process managed by BPEL4WS offers further flexibility to the deployment of business rules.
IDIOM has been designed from its inception to work in an XML environment and is therefore easily integrated into a web services architecture. By recognising that most business processes have steps that are predominantly rule based (often decisions impact the flow of a business process i.e. approval etc), IDIOM is well placed to contribute to a BPEL4WS managed business process. This document seeks to provide some context and discussion on the approach to integrating IDIOM into a BPEL4WS managed process and details how IDIOM can be deployed as a web service itself.
Business Process Execution Language
The new Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS), WS-Transaction, and WS-Coordination specifications provides a comprehensive business process automation framework that allows companies to leverage the power and benefits of the Web Services Architecture to create and automate business transactions1. The specification defines a mechanism with which a business process can be defined where the components of this business process are web services. The BPEL4WS description language expressed as XML allows collaborations and flows to be defined that express a business process; this process can then be deployed to an execution environment that supports BPEL4WS. The expressive flow language defined by BPEL4WS uses the constructs defined within WSDL and SOAP and extends these to define constructs to support flow activities, message correlation, process instantiation, fault handling, compensation handling and the management of flow dependencies (synchronisation).
BPEL4WS Context
For the purposes of this discussion, we have classified some of the services that we believe are important when implementing web services and a business process in BPEL4WS. These classifications help to provide a context for the role and position of the IDIOM Decision Suite in the remainder of this document. Table 1 provides a summary of the classification of web services that we use.
Initiator of a business process e.g. an application or another web service acting as a client
| Service Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Requesting | Initiator of a business process e.g. an application or another web service acting as a client |
| Decision | Services that make a business decision based on information provided |
| Storage | Services that integrate with storage systems for the purposes of saving data |
| Action | Services that perform some business action (e.g. credit card processing) |
| Query | Services that perform bulk queries for read-only, non-transactional data |
| Integration | Services that provide an interface to other processes or systems (e.g. SAP or legacy systems) |
Table 1: Web Services
- Referenced from web article http://www-06.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-autobp/