Introduction to the Business Management Process

Companies are faced with several challenges, such as data synchronization, trading partner integration, and human-oriented workflow.

Consider room service in one of the hotels in the Wonderland Casino application. When a customer places an order, the information is stored in a flat file and synchronized with the actual back-end resource once a day. Data synchronization is a major challenge, especially when the information needs to be stored in multiple resources.

Say that a customer places an order, but the employee who takes the order makes a typing error. The customer orders two plates of cheese, but the employee enters 200. This type of situation requires human interaction to check the order's validity and is an example of human-oriented workflows being used. Based on a certain condition, the workflow stops until a human interacts with the application and completes a task ”in this case, approval of the order.

Now imagine that during synchronization, the back-end system throws an alert that cheese is out of stock. At this point, some process is required to interact with the vendor to place an order for more cheese. This requires integration with the trading partner application, which involves challenges such as the mechanism and standards for communicating between the two applications.

Certain policies and procedures for defining the business need to be in place to meet these challenges. The mechanism for managing these policies and procedures is called business process management . Business processes can be manual or automated. Automating business processes when possible increases business agility and efficiency. WebLogic Integration provides standards-based integration focusing on design, runtime, and management features specific to process integration. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) provides integration to legacy systems. However, because each legacy application has its own proprietary Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), the J2EE Connector Architecture (J2CA) standard offers a standardized API for creating resource adapters that can be used with any J2EE server.

WebLogic Integration extends the J2CA architecture with an XML-based interface called Application View, making it easy to use adapters in a business process. Figure 11.1 shows the architecture of WebLogic Integration.

Figure 11.1. A business process accessing enterprise applications.

WebLogic Workshop is used to create the business process applications to be deployed using WebLogic Integration.