一篇我刚开始研究workflow时 写的工作报告

Weekly Report of Workflow Study    I

 

 

Last week we’ve studied the development environment of BPEL. On today’s meeting firstly we discussed our scale about the workflow, the concept, the models and the advantage of using it in the web-service layer of an application.

 We discussed the difference between the Jdevelop prepared by BPEL itself and the Eclipse in common use. We found Jdevelop has prepared a stronger ability and performance.  At last we discussed some tips about design BPEL.

 

1, About Workflow & Workflow Management System

 

Definition:

Workflow

The computerized facilitation or automation of a business process, in whole or part.

 

Workflow Management System

A system that completely defines manages and executes “workflows” through the execution of software whose order of execution is driven by a computer representation of the workflow logic.

 

Workflow is concerned with the automation of procedures where documents, information or tasks are passed between participants according to a defined set of rules to achieve, or contribute to, an overall business goal.

Whilst workflow may be manually organized, in practice most workflow is normally organized within the context of an IT system to provide computerized support for the procedural automation and it is to this area that the work of the Coalition is directed.

 

Workflow is often associated with Business Process Re-engineering, which is concerned with the assessment, analysis, modeling, definition and subsequent operational implementation of the core business processes of an organization (or other business entity). Although not all BPR activities result in workflow implementations, workflow technology is often an appropriate solution as it provides separation of the business procedure logic and its IT operational support, enabling subsequent changes to be incorporated into the procedural rules defining the business process. Conversely, not all workflow implementations necessarily form part of a BPR exercise, for example implementations to automate an existing business procedure.

A Workflow Management System is one which provides procedural automation of a business process by management of the sequence of work activities and the invocation of appropriate human and/or IT resources associated with the various activity steps.

 

BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) is the cornerstone of SOA. It is a manager system of workflow.

 

An increasing number of companies are looking at Web services and SOA as an architectural blue-print and a set of standards for addressing the integration requirements involved in building connected applications. While SOA has been a best practice for over a decade, there was some confusion about which interfaces to adopt. BPEL and Web services standards have solved this problem by addressing common application requirements in an open, portable and standard way. SOA enables business agility by maximizing leverage of existing resources while minimizing the cost of deploying new applications. Enterprises adopting these standards and architectural approach are already achieving significant ROI from using the same standards-based approach to building connected applications that they have used for building web applications with Java/J2EE.

 

Making web services work is a 2-step process. First you publish your services and then you compose, or orchestrate, them into business flows. Publishing a service means taking a function within an existing application or system and making it available in a standard way, while orchestration is composing multiple services into an end-to-end business process. The Web services standards, including WSDL, XML and SOAP, have emerged as an effective and highly interoperable platform for publishing services. In addition, high performance binding frameworks are allowing enterprises to access legacy systems and native Java code without necessarily having to wrap them in a SOAP interface.