JWT EclipseMag

Organization

• Title: Workflow Tooling within Eclipse
• Authors: Florian Lautenbacher, Bernhard Bauer (Uni Augsburg), Marc Dutoo (OpenWide), additional authors welcome!!

Introduction

During the last years the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is realized in more and more companies, very often applying Web Services but also other technolo- gies. Not only since the advent of SOA but now with much more attention, the modeling, analysis, design and execution of business processes is promoted by many vendors. These vendors sell tools that allow an overall management of the whole life-cycle of business processes (compare [12]). There already exist several open-source tools for modeling processes, deploying them on existing process- engines and monitoring them. Due to the huge amount of different tools most of them are not interoperable and tools are only usable for one specific kind of process engine, modeling tool or service registry.

Gartner says that especially the continuity from business processes on the one hand to the realization by services in an SOA is still a big problem. There are already a lot of tools that allow the one or the other (modeling in BPMN [10] or UML activity diagrams [9] or orchestrating in WS-BPEL [7]), but the continuity from the business view to the technical details is often missing [4].

This is the setting which we aim to improve. In the Eclipse-project Java Workflow Tooling (JWT) we are currently developing a complete toolset for the modeling of business processes, refining them with technical information to executable workflows and deploying and monitoring them on process engines.

In this paper we describe the integration issues and our solution. Therefore, in the next section we give some basic definitions and show the issues that companies starting in the field of business process management (BPM) and SOA have at the moment. After that we describe the architecture of JWT, before we go into more details for some parts of the solution. We conclude with some next steps that are currently taking to enhance JWT to a fully blown tool for semantic business process modeling.