Level: Intermediate Hernan Silberman (hernanpub@gmail.com), Freelance Writer, Consultant
Manas Mandal (mmandal@gmail.com), Architect, Consultant
10 May 2007 You have a pretty robust system of services, but what you really want is an
application that makes use of them to implement your business processes. Web
Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) provides you with a standard
technology for composing and combining Web services so they will do what you want at
the macro level, and not just the micro level. This tutorial, the last of a
seven-part series, explains how to create a process flow for your services using
WS-BPEL.
In this tutorial
In this tutorial, you learn about Web Services Business Process Execution
Language, or WS-BPEL. This standard is for developers who create programs that
coordinate the efforts of multiple Web services to handle a business process. Follow along as the Daily Moon newspaper team uses the WS-BPEL
specifications to make the of the Web services described throughout this series
work with other Web services.
Objectives - Understand WS-BPEL and its approach of composing Web services to build
new applications
- Learn WS-BPEL key terms.
- Learn how to combine WSDL documents to make a parent process document.
- Learn the syntax of creating BPEL definition documents.
- Learn how to set up and run the business process using provided code
samples.
Prerequisites
In order to follow along with this tutorial, you should have a basic
understanding of SOAP, which you can achieve by reading
Part 1 of this series
(by extension, you also need a basic understanding of XML). SOAP is
programming-language agnostic. However, the samples in this tutorial use
Java™ and the Apache Axis2 project, even though the concepts apply to any
programming language and environment.
System requirements
Much of this tutorial is conceptual, but in order to follow along with the code
that uses Apache Neethi to work with WS-BPEL documents, you need the following
software installed:
Java 2 Standard Edition
version 1.4.2 or higher
—All of these tools are Java-based, as are the services and clients you build in
this tutorial.
Apache
Neethi
—Apache Neethi is what Axis2 uses to create a run-time representation of policy
documents, and to perform normalization, merging, and intersection operations on
policy documents.
Apache Geronimo or
another application server—This tutorial series uses the Apache Geronimo J2EE
server throughout (which is the basis for IBM WebSphere® Community Edition
server). You can use other application servers instead, but Geronimo is simple,
lightweight, and freely available, so it is a good choice for getting
up-and-running quickly.
BPWS4J version 2.1
—IBM provides a BPEL runtime, which
enables you to run processes that are written using WS-BPEL. BPWS4J is available for a
90-day trial period. A Web browser and a text editor.
Duration
2 hours
Formats html, pdf
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