BPEL Cookbook: Best Practices for SOA-based integration and composite applications development: Ten practical real-world case studies combining business … management and web services orchestration
April 27, 2010 by BPELforum · 5 Comments
Product Description
Ten practical real-world case studies combining business process management and web services orchestration
- Real-world BPEL recipes for SOA integration and Composite Application development
- Combining business process management and web services orchestration
- Techniques and best practices with downloadable code samples from ten real-world case studies
In Detail
Service Oriented Architecture is generating a buzz across the whole IT industry. Propelled by standards-based technologies like XML, Web Services, and SOAP, SOA is quickly moving from pilot projects to mainstream applications critical to business operations. One of the key standards accelerating the adoption of SOA is Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL).
BPEL was created to enable effective composition of web services in a service-oriented environment. In the past two years, BPEL has become the most significant standard to elevate the visibility of SOA from IT to business level. BPEL is not only commoditizing the integration market, but it is also offering organizations a whole new level of agility – ability to rapidly change applications in response to the changing business landscape. BPEL enables organizations to automate their business processes by orchestrating services within and across the firewall. It forces organizations to think in terms of services. Existing functionality is exposed as services. New applications are composed using services. Communication with external vendors and partners is through services. Services are reused across different applications. Services are, or should be, everywhere!
What you will learn from this book?
In the Packt book Business Process Execution Language for Web Services by Matjaz Juric, we learnt about the building blocks and how these technologies could be used to build a simple SOA solution. As organizations increase their SOA footprint, IT Managers, Architects, and developers are starting to realize that the impact of SOA on IT and business operations can be immense. After having gained confidence with web services, they want to take it to the next level. However, adopters are challenged with some basic questions – How do I SOA-enable my existing integration investment? Can I build flexible and agile business processes? How can I administer my SOA environment without spending a fortune? There have been various best practices defined around SOA, but to date these have been somewhat abstract and lacking a real-world basis. The IT community is looking for real-world examples; examples of how other companies are embarking on an SOA initiative and how to apply that industry learning to their own projects.
What makes this a Cookbook? After you have been exposed to the different ingredients (BPEL, WSDL, and web services), this book takes the adventure to the next level by helping you cook new recipes (SOA applications) using efficient kitchen techniques (best practices). 10 SOA practitioners have gotten together to share their SOA best practices and provide practical viewpoints to tackle many of the common problems SOA promises to solve. Their recommendations are based on projects in production; their existing projects could be your next ones. Through this process you’ll learn the techniques and gain the confidence to create and deliver the recipe that’s right for your particular situation.
Who this book is written for?
This book is aimed at architects and developers building applications in Service Oriented Architecture. The book presumes knowledge of BPEL, SOA, XML, web services, and multi-tier architectures.
The book talks about BPEL in a way expecting that your a BPEL GURU, I brought this book to learn BPEL, not to hear how other people used it.
Rating: 1 / 5
I wish this book was release a few months before as it would have saved me a lot of time and effort, with its real life examples for BPEL process implementations its a great book to have for anyone who is a new or regular user of OraBPEL.
It is an excellent book for someone new to the Oracle BPEL as well as gives excellent tips/ideas to experienced users in areas of :
- Managing an Oracle BPEL Production environment
- Using BRE rules engine for rule segregation
- Building Dynamic BPEL processes
- and Enriching the workflow applications.
I would have also liked to see some usage tips for Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and BPEL integration to real time application reporting through BAM.
Overall a comprehensive BPEL book with great amount of experience “cooked” into it.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book, a collection of real world BPEL patterns is a must for any budding or experienced BPEL developer. My company are a software development company specialising in SOA solutions. We have deployed a number for successful SOA projects with BPEL, running on the Oracle BPEL engine, being the cornerstone technology on these projects. This book, along with associated tutorials, has been a key factor in achieving this success – giving us a headstart for some of the key patterns you will need in any BPEL project. It has saved us many days in our R&D lab by pointing us to the code we require for standard tasks required in our BPEL process – these patterns are an excellent addition to any BPEL teams developer standards and guidelines. The book is intuitive to follow, leading the developer you through cases with workable examples that you can build and deploy in your own environment.
All of the patterns in the book form a useful library of common BPEL scenarios. The pattern related to Dynamic Partner Links gave our development team a great hand in designing BPEL projects for production – on certain projects we use this extensively to give deployment options that are not suited to a web service directory.
The chapter on maintenance and management was invaluable for our Application Administrators. It is always easy to get a Proof of Concept BPEL process working in a lab environment, it is the issues faced when rolling this out across an enterprise that cause often time consuming resolution. This chapter gives many tips and leads you to understand the dehydration store for BPEL instances – a very good start point to build up reference documentation for any Application Administrator who intends to manage BPEL in a live environment.
Chapters on Business Rules (a technology that I feel is essential within SOA and within any BPEL solution) and on Reliable Processing give excellent introduction to the topics a developer will need to understand to build production standard BPEL.
The chapters on Rich Application UI and Building BPEL proc on the fly raises interesting ideas that have certainly triggered design innovations in our team. The WSIF chapter is very useful as a reference and includes many examples of techniques for what you will need within your toolkit.
Altogether an excellent addition to any developers bookshelf, but of particular necessity to anyone intending to use Oracle SOA tools to develop applications.
Rating: 5 / 5
Many of our clients are migrating from traditional Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) to the standard based SOA. This book has ten real-world case studies, which helped me to architect the solutions. Sometimes I use this book as best practices of Oracle BPEL-PM .
I like this book because the approach is more real-life examples than theory. Developers with minimum experience in SOA world will be able to leverage this emerging technology very easily.
Even though this book is useful for anybody to understand SOA and BPEL, this is extra useful for the people who are using Oracle Fusion Middleware (BPEL Process Manager).
Rating: 5 / 5
The BPEL Cookbook is an excellent practical guide to real-world SOA integration issues. It is not a “Learn BPEL” book, but rather the next step once you learn how to develop in BPEL. It addresses various types of issues that one needs to consider when developing BPEL processes. Chapter 3, “Building the Service Value Chain”, addresses the core of building a SOA architecture that the business process must be standardized and documented. While a couple of chapters are Oracle BPEL centric, the rest of the chapters address generic issues of any BPEL implementation. In particular, Reliable Messaging, Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF), building dynamic BPEL processes, and centralizing logging and error handling. For those using Oracle BPEL, chapter 5 shows how to use the Worklist API to build a rich Internet application. And chapter 2 shows how to integrate PeopleSoft CRM with Oracle eBusiness Suite.
Rating: 5 / 5