The IBM® WebSphere® Business Integration zone contains articles, tutorials, code samples, roadmaps, and access to many other resources. This extensive library can help business process designers and application developers create, enhance, and maintain their business applications. This page provides a brief introduction to the IBM WebSphere Business Integration family of products and describes resources available to help you learn more.
WebSphere Business Integration is a family of products that enables companies to define, create, merge, consolidate, and streamline business processes using applications that run on a service-oriented architected IT infrastructure. These products include design and development tools, runtime servers, monitoring tools, toolkits, and process templates. Like all WebSphere products, they are built on the J2EE standard-based WebSphere Application Server foundation.
WebSphere Business Integration products provide many of the services in the SOA Reference Architecture.
WebSphere Integration Developer, an
eclipse-based IDE, provides development services, which you use to build and deploy standards-based business process applications.
WebSphere Process Server, built on WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technologies, provides a comprehensive run time including process choreography that supports long and short running business processes, role-based human tasks and workflow, and features for dynamic and adaptive processes based on service-oriented architecture.
WebSphere Message Broker contributes to the connectivity services and near universal transformation for standards and non-standards data types. It enables connection to both standard and non-standards based applications and services.
WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, built on WebSphere Application Server, provides Web services connectivity, JMS messaging, and service oriented integration for standards-based applications.
WebSphere MQ provides business application services through integration of applications and Web services.
WebSphere Partner Gateway is a business-to-business gateway that enables companies to connect large groups of trading partners to their businesses and extend internal integration outside the enterprise.
WebSphere Service Registry and Repository is a centralized system that works within a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to manage, store, and access information about service metadata within an organization and across organizations.
You use WebSphere Business Integration products to model, develop, manage, and monitor business process applications. You can automate processes involving people and heterogeneous systems, both inside and outside of the enterprise. You can optimize your business operations so that they are scalable, reliable, and efficient. The variety of products in this family provide extensive flexibility.
For example, let's walk through a potential business process scenario.
The various components might exchange messages using
WebSphere MQ.
You might expand the process to incorporate interaction with your business partners using
WebSphere Partner Gateway.
If your application needs to connect to Web services, you could use
WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, which provides basic connectivity services.
If your application needs more advanced services or the ability to connect to non-standard interfaces, then you could use
WebSphere Message Broker instead.
Your application might access back-end applications or technologies such as DB2® PeopleSoft, SAP or Siebel, using
WebSphere Adapters.
This is a simple example to give you an idea of how some of the products work together to provide the services of an integrated business process. Other WebSphere Business Integration products provide additional process management capabilities. To see all the products in this set, see
WebSphere Integration Family.
The way you work with WebSphere Business Integration depends upon your role.
However, the SOA Reference Architecture includes a common repository and
the tools are built on common frameworks to promote joint development, asset management, and collaboration
among the team members as they develop, manage, and monitor the business process application.
For example:
A business analyst or process designer uses
WebSphere Business Modeler to
chart and simulate the existing and to-be business process definitions. He or she can export the process
definition to a Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) file, and then specify key performance indicators (KPI's) that should be used to monitor the process once it is in production.
The Software architect can import the WS-BPEL file into
Rational Software Architect,
where he or she creates an implementation model using UML.
Integration developers configure the process with new and existing applications
and enable it for human interaction using
WebSphere Integration Developer.
This role is filled by someone who is somewhat technically oriented and thoroughly understands the
process flow, but does not require Java skill.
Managers and business analysts use
WebSphere Business Monitor
to track and analyze your company's business processes. It includes a customizable dashboard, implemented as
WebSphere Portal pages with scorecards, key performance indicators, and gauges.
These are some examples of how various team members use WebSphere Business Integration products to help produce and manage business process applications. The flexible architecture enables a company to plug in the pieces and players that are right for its specific business needs.
The WebSphere Business Integration zone on developerWorks, WebSphere can help you get started with
WebSphere Business Integration products. The zone includes in-depth technical resources to help you use WebSphere Business Integration products to integrate your company's data, applications, and business processes.
Pick from these learning sources to fit your learning style:
Listen to the podcast series on using the SOA programming model to help extend and enhance your existing software applications and infrastructure. Stay tuned for future topics available soon. See the
entire WebSphere Technical Podcast series.
Get started with WebSphere Business Integration information roadmaps for Web information, training classes, IBM Redbooks, and other resources that can help you accomplish various tasks with WebSphere Business Integration products.
For product information, documentation, education, downloads, and more for all of the WebSphere Business Integration products, see the Process Integration product Web site.
The article From business modeling to Web services implementation: Part 1: Modeling a business process: Part 1 of this two-part article series introduces you to a sample scenario in which a simple business process is modeled using WebSphere Business Integration Modeler. Part 2 shows how WebSphere Studio Application Developer, Integration Edition uses the WebSphere Business Integration Modeler artifacts to define Web service definitions.
This three-part article series, Using WebSphere Partner Gateway on Linux, shows you how to install WebSphere Partner Gateway Enterprise on Linux Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1, configure and administer a Trading Partner Community that uses AS2, and extend the Trading Community for FTP communication.
This article explains why using an Enterprise Service Bus, the foundation of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), makes life easier for developers: Why do developers need an Enterprise Service Bus?
