Process Integration [chapter]

Lachlan Aldred
2009 Modern Business Process Automation  
i Dedicated to my wife Thongkham Aldred for her patience, and to my daughter Monikha Aldred for her interest in all things scientific. ii iii Abstract Technologies and languages for integrated processes are a relatively recent innovation. Over that period many divergent waves of innovation have transformed process integration. Like sockets and distributed objects, early workflow systems offered programming interfaces that connected the process modelling layer to any middleware. BPM systems
more » ... ed later, connecting the modelling world to middleware through components. While BPM systems increased ease of use (modelling convenience), long-standing and complex interactions involving many process instances remained difficult to model. Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs), followed, connecting process models to heterogeneous forms of middleware. ESBs, however, generally forced modellers to choose a particular underlying middleware and to stick to it, despite their ability to connect with many forms of middleware. Furthermore ESBs encourage process integrations to be modelled on their own, logically separate from the process model. This can lead to the inability to reason about long standing conversations at the process layer. Technologies and languages for process integration generally lack formality. This has led to arbitrariness in the underlying language building blocks. Conceptual holes exist in a range of technologies and languages for process integration and this can lead to customer dissatisfaction and failure to bring integration projects to reach their potential.
doi:10.1007/978-3-642-03121-2_19 fatcat:4m7pco7va5awtpoia2fb7b3qau