Orchestration of Web Services, Using WS-BPEL
LAB-5510

Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOAs) have become very popular architectural paradigms. New business applications are built by combination and reuse of services that are distributed over the Internet. Within an enterprise, services are broken down into logical units, akin to building blocks that are easy to develop, manage, and maintain. Complex applications are built on top of these building blocks to provide higher-level quality of service and/or to provide an orchestrated service. To realize such a service-oriented architecture, SOA architects and developers need capabilities such as receiving and sending messages, processing synchronous and asynchronous messages, data massaging, concurrent processing, event processing, exception handling, and compensation handling. The Oasis standard Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) helps SOA architects and developers provide exactly the solution they are aiming for. WS-BPEL is expressive enough to declaratively and simply define many of these complex features of service orchestration and/or composition.

Although WS-BPEL is expressive enough to declaratively and simply define all these complex features of service orchestration, it soon becomes quite complicated in a different sense. XML files describing the business process can pose authoring and debugging challenges, which warrant a good tool to help reduce complexity for WS-BPEL authors. The good news is that NetBeans Enterprise Pack software bridges that gap remarkably well. The NetBeans IDE BPEL editor provides an intuitive representation of the process flow, robust support of correlations, powerful yet intuitive data massaging and transformation support, a powerful static and semantic validation infrastructure, comprehensive filtering, highlighting and navigation functionality, and multiple views for programmers using various programming styles.

Although WS-BPEL helps SOA architects and developers orchestrate their services, the solution is not complete without a platform that provides the ability to enable these services. The evolution of integration solutions has led the industry toward a service bus architecture. Using the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is the preferred way to provide SOA capabilities, and Java Business Integration (JBI) has increasingly become a de facto choice for implementing the ESB.

This Hands-on Lab briefly introduces the JBI platform and its relevance with a WS-BPEL engine. It focuses primarily on and demonstrates in depth the web service orchestration capabilities of WS-BPEL using the NetBeans IDE?s editor for WS-BPEL.

Specifically, the lab does the following:

• Briefly introduces the JBI platform
• Walks through the BPEL constructs in detail and discusses their relevance to various SOA requirements
• Uses the NetBeans IDE?s BPEL editor to build business processes
• Demonstrates the use of BPEL constructs via some simulated real-world examples

Prerequisites: knowledge of web services, SOA, and XML; some understanding of WSDLs and HTTP binding.

You need to be a registered Sun Developer Network member to download the lab and view the instructions. If you are a registered SDN member, please click on "Download or Instructions" button to log-in to view the lab. If you wish to join SDN, please click here.