Business Process: A set of related activities that produces an output that no activity would produce individually.

Module: A project used for development, version management, organizing resources, and deployment to the IBM BPM runtime environment. A “business” Module (labeled as just “Module” in the development tooling) may contain business processes, human tasks, business rules, mediation flows and Java services. Modules are packaged and deployed to the runtime as enterprise archive files (.EAR files).*

Mediation Module: Also a business integration project that is used for development, version management, organizing resources, and deployment to the IBM BPM runtime environment. Contains flows that intercept and modify messages between exports and imports (known as mediation flows) and Java services. Mediation Modules are packaged and deployed to the runtime as enterprise archive files (.EAR files).*

Project: An organized collection of folders or packages; largest structural unit in your workspace.

Library: A project that is used for the development, version management, and organization of shared resources. A library may contain business objects, interfaces, maps, and mediation subflows. Libraries may be packaged within a Module/Mediation Module or directly to the IBM BPM server environment as a globally available standalone resource. Libraries are packaged as Java archive files (.JAR files).

Interface: In general, an interface is a contract which defines the parameters of a service provided by some service provider. In IBM Integration Designer (IID) and IBM BPM, interfaces are represented as WSDL files (but they may be used for services that are exposed using technologies other than Web Services protocols). An interface is uniquely identified by its name and namespace and describes the operations provided by the service implementation.

Callout: A mediation flow primitive that is used for invoking a service operation from a mediation request flow. Callout execution typically marks the end of a mediation request flow. If a response (or error) is returned by the invoked service, the mediation flow will continue execution in its response flow.

Service Invoke: A mediation flow primitive that is used for invoking a service operation from a request flow, without switching flow contexts. If a response (or error) is returned by the invoked service, the mediation flow will continue execution in its request flow.

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol): The protocol to exchange or transfer hypertext (structured text that includes logical links between nodes which contain texts).

API (Application Programming Interface): Specifies how software components should work together, including data structures & variables.

Message Filter: Looks for patterns in incoming messages and specifies how they’re routed.

Import: Outgoing components. These are the inputs into other services.

Export: Incoming components. These are the outputs of other services.

Mapping: Used to transform data from one format to a format that the receiving service can process. Includes XML maps and business object maps.

Invoke:

SMO (Service Message Object): Provide an abstraction layer for processing & manipulating messages exchanged between services.

Correlation Context: Enables primitives to pass values from the request flow to its response flow

Transient Context: Enables primitives to pass values to each other in the current flow.

Shared Context: Shares values between all branches of a flow.

Subflow: Integration logic inside a module. Allows for nesting and reuse.

Solution Diagram:

BPEL (Business Process Execution Language): Standard executable language for specifying the interactions with web services.

Service: Any reusable asset, such as a function call. Seeks to integrate business processes with competitor services, legacy apps, etc.