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 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.

Background

In the introduction we are speaking about workflows on the one side and BPM on the other. But where exactly is the difference? A common understanding is the basis for further discussion about the improvement of business process management.

A business process is a set of one or more linked procedures or activities which collectively realise a business objective or policy goal, normally within the context of an organisational structure defining functional roles and relation- ships [14]. A workflow [6] on the other side is the automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedu- ral rules [14] or simply the computerised facilitation or automation of a business process, in whole or part [13]. The difference between business process man- agement and workflow has also been described as: BPM and workflow are seen as essentially the same, albeit with some differences of emphasis [5]. The term workflow is used to denote a series of related interactions between people and a computer system. Where workflow is more often used in a technical context, BPM has a broader scope. It implies also the non-technical issues like analysis, organizational impact, from the viewpoint of a manager [1].

Generally speaking a process is a formalized view of a business process, rep- resented as a co-ordinated (parallel and/or serial) set of process activities that are connected in order to achieve a common goal [14]. There are four layers of process definition:

• the state layer: control flow, states and actors
• the context layer: process context variables and references
• the programming logic layer: software in binary or source format
• the user interface layer: interactivity with human users [1].

There are many vendors who sell tools for BPM, workflows and SOA. However, a monitoring tool is normally only designed for one specific process engine and the modeling tools cannot be used to generate code for all kinds of process engines. This becomes especially a problem in the open-source area.