SOPERA Blog

SOPERA Intalio|BPM Adapter 1.0 Launched

We’ve launched it. Now, we think it’s time you tried it out! After all, we posted a number of blogs on our SOA + BPM solution. Now, you can download the very first version of SOPERA Intalio|BPM Adapter from our downloads page at Product Downloads: SOPERA Intalio|BPM Adapter 1.0.

A Short Product Usage Tour

For more information on how to use the features in SOPERA Intalio|BPM Adapter, read the previous post on Using SOA Services Within Your BPM Processes.

Feedback

Once you’ve downloaded the product, watched our screencasts (see, previous paragraph) and tried it out all by yourself, please do send us feedback by leaving a comment on this post.

Anne Aloysious Entwicklung adapter, BPM, Intalio, SOA

As promised in the last blog post on SOPERA Intalio|BPM Adapter here comes the first in the series of our blog posts dedicated to the topic of BPM and SOPERA.

Browsing the SOPERA Intalio|BPM Adapter Tooling User Interface

This short video takes you through the user interface and shows you the major functions that we at SOPERA contributed to the standard Intalio|Designer User Interface, such as:

• SOPERA Service Registry View
• SOPERA Project Preferences Page
• SOPERA Intalio|BPM Adapter Eclipse Help

Creating a simple BPM Process

Now, that you have familiarized yourself with the user interface it’s time to try creating a simple BPM process. This video will show you just how easy it is to do that!

As you can see all you need to do to use services from SOPERA Service Registry is to drag an operation from the Service Registry View and drop it onto the BPM diagram.

Adding Security Features

In Intalio|Designer you can implement security features: to do this you simply locate the SOPERA ESB tab in the Properties View of the Designer and then add a policy and authentication credentials as required. This video show you how we do that in less than a minute.

Using Dynamic Credentials

You can also make use of dynamic credentials in SOPERA Intalio|BPM Adapter; here’s how:

We’ll be updating this post in the near future so do come back & visit this page for the latest news on SOA & BPM.

Renat Zubairov Entwicklung BPM, Intalio, SOA, SOPERA

Milestone!

Last week we had a very important milestone in the development of SOPERA Intalio|BPM Adapter: we published a Release Candidate for Version 1.0. Currently, it’s not available for the general public to download. Instead, we are going to install for selected customers who will work with it under constant supervision and monitoring from our Professional Services team members. However, in a few of weeks you will all be able to download the first release from our website.

Release 1.0

As you might have seen in our previous blogs there has been a delay in the planned release date of our first release candidate. One of the interesting aspects of our development scenario was that it was accomplished in close cooperation with our selected customers, which allowed us to build many more features that we had at first anticipated during the initial planning phase and this naturally ended up costing us more time. The time was well spent and I’m very satisfied with the result. SOPERA Intalio|BPM Adapter, Release 1.0 contains many useful features and provides a significantly better user experience than we had imagined at the beginning. We enhanced both the runtime and design aspects of Intalio|BPM. Now, BPM users can make the best use of all the benefits found in an enterprise-scale SOA platform provided by SOPERA.

SOPERA Intalio|BPM Adapter

SOPERA ASF and Intalio|BPM

SOPERA ASF and Intalio|BPM in SOPERA Intalio|BPM Adapter represents a uniquely well-integrated SOA BPM Suite which in spite of its being open-source can compete with commercial offerings from big software vendors like Oracle, IBM and Progress Software, to name a few.

Major Features and Enhancements

This post is the first post in a series in which I will shortly describe and demonstrate the major features and enhancements that were done for our Intalio|BPM Adapter project. I intend to cover these topics in my next blog posts:

• Using existing services in your BPMN diagrams, I will show you how to comfortably browse through services that are available in your SOA infrastructure and reuse them in your BPMN diagrams using the drag and drop menu option. I will also show you how different communication styles are used and how your process react to changes in underlying services.
• Exposing BPMN processes as a service provider - in this part of the presentation I will describe and show you the two ways in which you can expose BPMN processes as a service and make it available for reuse in other processes and applications. I will also discuss how to deploy it and what communication styles you can use with it.

So stay tuned!

Renat Zubairov Entwicklung BPM, Intalio, SOA, SOPERA

Testing SOPERA-Intalio Add-On

In the last blog we shared with you our intention of combining SOA and BPM using SOPERA ASF and Intalio|BPM as the basis for an integration project. We now have some news about our approach to testing the SOPERA-Intalio add-on.

How we did testing
Previously, this is how we did testing; all our test cases were written, version-controlled, and deployed in our continuous build integration system (Cruise Control). For each possible Intalio|BPM scenario, one corresponding JUnit-based test was written. Each JUnit test case prepared test data and sent it to a specific Intalio process which in turn called up a SOPERA process. After that the JUnit testcase made an assertion on the Intalio response. Everything was then augmented with an automated Intalio/Intalio-SOPERA Add-On installation and process deployment so that we had a clean test-fixture each time.

What is new
After the initial implementation we realized that the only added value of JUnit in this case is assertion and test data setup, and as JUnit tests are sometimes hard to write and especially hard to maintain, we decided instead to simply use the full power of BPMN to move all our integration tests to a BPMN-only environment. We created a simple schema for process requests and responses where the request is left empty and the required response only requires a single boolean result.

We created a simple JUnit testcase which uses Apache ODE interfaces to discover processes and then one-by-one, verifies the response. For example, in the following picture you can see the integration test that tests the One-Way SOPERA call:

One-Way Integration Test

It is not easy to verify that the one-way service call was successful, so the BPMN Process above executes a one-way call (createLending) and then checks that the created service state is subsequently modified (by checking lending from the seekBook results).

All that the tester has to do now is:

1. Set up the BPM test environment.
2. Check out and modify the default test sets in the version control system.
3. Check it in, tag it, so that a new build is automatically created in cruise control: this starts the testing process.
4. Check the test results in Cruise Control.

That’s it!

Why we decided to take this approach

The following are the benefits we hope to achieve with this new approach:

1. All our development team members have the option of designing and testing a BPM process. We believe that using what we create is vital for successful product development.
2. Each of test cases created by a team member can be executed by any team member.
3. BPMN diagrams are much easier to understand and maintain.
4. It simulates the real user environment so that a form of in-house user acceptance testing is at play.
5. With the powerful BPMS Console from Intalio server we are presented with a perfect post-mortem examination process for our test cases and results. Since all our integration tests are BPMN processes we could investigate them step-by-step and find the reason for test failures.

Renat Zubairov Entwicklung BPM, SOA, SOPERA-Intalio, Testing

SOPERA and Intalio

The case for using BPM in your SOA environment has long been discussed as an important milestone event in the history of SOA. Experts in the field have convincingly made the case for incorporating BPM and SOA.

What does this have to do with SOPERA? Well, we are currently working on an exciting project to extend and improve our efforts to further integrate with Intalio BPM.

If you’ve been using SOPERA ASF and have Intalio BPM (Server and Designer) you can with this add-on make use of both Intalio’s BPM processes and SOPERA’s SOA services. Now you can have your business analyst map universal, concise, and easily comprehensible BPM processes and use the SOPERA Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to connect or build the underlying application services.

With this integration in place, you can now install both SOPERA ASF and Intalio BPM Designer in the same Eclipse IDE and use the processes and services in it as shown in this figure.

This add-on enables calls SOPERA services from within your existing business processes with all the advantages that SOPERA provides such as:

• Service Registry Look-up (Location Independence)
• Policies
• Security Features
• Transport Independence (for example, HTTP, HTTPS, and JMS)

And finally and most importantly, our ESB hides the underlying implementation technology of your services (such as JEE, .NET, or SAP to name a few examples) from your business processes.

If you want to see a feature preview in action, take a look at the following use case scenarios in these screencasts:

• Call a SOPERA Service from a Process Deployed into an Intalio BPM Server.
• Trigger a Business Process from a SOPERA Service Consumer.

Coming Soon!

• Visual Service Registry Integration with Drag & Drop capabilities
• BPMN Pools with Associated Authentication Information and Policies
• Easy-to-follow Tutorials and Examples

This integration can be used by existing Intalio customers and will be part of an enterprise-level SOPERA BPM offering.
Stay tuned!

Anne Aloysious Entwicklung BPM, Intalio, SOA, SOPERA ToolSuite