Essential Business Process Modeling

Summary

The main points in this chapter include the following:

• A BPEL implementation of a human workflow-oriented insurance claims process is demonstrated using Oracle BPEL Process Manager. The example was introduced in the discussion in Chapter 3 of state machines. The nature of architecture of human workflow is discussed in Chapter 2.

• Oracle BPEL Process Manager includes a graphical design tool that runs on Eclipse , a runtime engine that can run standalone or on most of the leading J2EE application servers, and a web-based administrative console.

• Oracle BPEL Process Manager is recommended for this example for the following reasons: it’s free and easy to download and assemble, it’s BPEL 1.1-compliant, it’s designed to facilitate rapid development, and it offers a good task manager implementation.

• Our to-be Insurance Claims process uses a flow activity with conditional links to model the complex mainline logic, and a globally scoped event handler to process cancellations. But during unit testing it was discovered, possibly revealing a product bug, that messages bound for the event handler were not reaching it. To work around the problem, the event handler was removed and the cancellation logic moved to a receive activity in the flow activity. The workaround was successful.