Developing EJB client applications for BPEL processes and human tasks

The EJB APIs provide a set of generic methods for developing EJB client applications for working with the BPEL processes and human tasks that are installed on a Process Server.

About this task

With these Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) APIs, you can create client applications to perform the following actions:

Manage the lifecycle of processes and tasks from starting them through to deleting them when they complete
Repair activities and processes
Manage and distribute the workload over members of a work group

The EJB APIs are provided as two stateless session enterprise beans:

BusinessFlowManagerService interface provides the methods for BPEL process applications
HumanTaskManagerService interface provides the methods for task-based applications

For more information on the EJB APIs, see the Javadoc in the com.ibm.bpe.api package and the com.ibm.task.api package.

The following steps provide an overview of the actions you need to take to develop an EJB client application.

Procedure

Decide on the functionality that the application is to provide.
Decide which of the session beans that you are going to use.
Depending on the scenarios that you want to implement with your application, you can use one, or both, of the session beans.
Determine the authorization authorities needed by users of the application.
The users of your application must be assigned the appropriate authorization roles to call the methods that you include in your application, and to view the objects and the attributes of these objects that these methods return. When an instance of the appropriate session bean is created, WebSphere® Application Server associates a context with the instance. The context contains information about the caller's principal ID, group membership list, and roles. This information is used to check the caller's authorization for each call.

The Javadoc contains authorization information for each of the methods.
Decide how to render the application.
The EJB APIs can be called locally or remotely.
Develop the application.
1. Access the EJB API.
2. Use the EJB API to interact with processes or tasks.
  - Query the data.
  - Work with the data.