Implementing a human-centric business process application using WebSphere Portlet Factory: Part 3: Developing user interfaces for originating and participating tasks

Level: Intermediate

Neil R. Santos (nrsanto@ca.ibm.com), Software Developer, IBM

30 Apr 2008

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This series illustrates how to implement an end-to-end Web-based or portal-based human-centric business process application using IBM® WebSphere® Integration Developer, WebSphere Portlet Factory, WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere Application Server, and WebSphere Portal. The third article of this series provides details on developing and testing a human task client application.

In this tutorial

Upon completion of this tutorial, you should be able to:

• Develop a standalone Web application.
  
  
• Test the interface and conduct functional testing.
  
  
• Create a portal-based application that runs on WebSphere Portal.
  
  
• Create WAR files that can be deployed onto production servers.
  

Prerequisites

You should have completed the first two articles in this series, see the article, Implementing a human-centric business process application using WebSphere Portlet Factory: Part 1: Solution overview to get started.

System requirements

Required: In order to begin, you must prepare a few things in your environment:

• WebSphere Portlet Factory Version 6.0.2.
• The archive from the WebSphere Portlet Factory Archive Generator plug-in (from the previous article) is available to facilitate UI development. If you do not have this available you will have to have the process WSDL's on hand, as well as additional information about the process, such as the task type, task template name and task template namespace. This information can be provided from the Integration Developer.
• A test application server for initial UI and functional testing of your application must be available. You may use WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (CE) which is packaged with WebSphere Portlet Factory or WebSphere Application Server if you choose. If you are generating portlets you may choose to use WebSphere Portal Server Version 6.0.1.1. Note that this involves a few tweaks to the models, which will be outlined later on. Since CE is sufficient for our purposes and is lightweight, we will use this. Even if you are ultimately developing portlets, it still makes good sense to deploy to CE for initial UI and functional testing.

Optional (To complete all testing): As you will see later on, some testing involves Web service communication to the process server. For this, we require that:

• WebSphere Process Server Version 6.0.2 must be installed and accessible.
• The target process for which the client application is being developed must be installed on the process server. For example, the Article Proposal process developed in Part 2 should be installed and running.

Duration

1 hour

Formats

Summary

This tutorial introduces another component of the Business Process Integration Extension that will assist in the development of human task client applications. The Business Process Integration Extension feature set, a WebSphere Portlet Factory feature, contains builders and models for creating user interfaces to handle originating and participating human tasks running in WebSphere Process Server.

The Human Task Processing Action builder, contained within this feature set, helps generate these client applications by providing process schema information for the UI and creating the right human task Web service calls. This shields the UI developer from being mired in the details of the actual business process, thus reducing the chances of miscommunication and error.

Also available in the feature set is the Human Task Processing Modeling Template. This is a prefabricated model that uses the aforementioned builder. It incorporates out-of-the-box Portlet factory builders (such as "Data Page" and "Button") to build the actual application. This is where you'll really see the reusable nature of WebSphere Portlet Factory.

This part of the series moves forward in the development process from the perspective of the User Interface developer. Using WebSphere Portlet Factory, you'll create a standalone Web application, and then provide user interface testing as well as functional testing. You'll also learn how to create a portal-based application, so that it can be run on WebSphere Portal. Finally, you will create WAR files that can be deployed onto production servers.

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