WSO2 Webinar - Business Processes with Human Smarts

What is a business process? A series of steps that need to be performed in order to provide goods or services. Processes that used to be performed by humans are becoming increasingly automated by enterprise IT, allowing them to be performed more quickly and reliably and at much greater scale. But there can be unintended consequences - reverberation of failures, lack of accountability, an inability to handle situations outside the norm.

So why are business processes challenging to get right? Getting it right often means striking a good balance between automation and using the wisdom and flexibility of the human mind. But the technologies and systems for automating interactions which include humans differs substantially from automating interactions among software applications. This gulf has been difficult to bridge. Until now.

The recent introduction of two new standards in this space - BPEL4People and WS-Human Task - enables organizations to extend automated systems smoothly to include human interaction. WSO2 supports these new capabilities in the latest release of the WSO2 Business Process Server.

Your presenter, Milinda Pathirage, will cover the following topics:

Scenarios highlighting business process involving humans Insights into BPEL4People and WS-Human Tasks Overview of the WSO2 Business Process Server Review of the new human-interaction features of the latest version of the WSO2 BPS

Who should attend:

Architects and developers expanding their toolkit to include business processes

Business process analysts

Consultants and analysts specializing in SOA

Milinda Pathirage is product manager for the WSO2 Business Process Server and is an active contributor for Apache ODE project. He brings a wealth of knowledge on business processes and how enterprises leverage these technologies today.

WSO2 Business Process Server 2.0.0 Released

WSO2 Business Process Server (WSO2 BPS) 2.0.0 is released few weeks back.

WSO2 BPS is an opensource BPEL process engine which support BPEL4People and WS-HumanTasks

New features are:

• BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask Support(Experimental)
• Instance cleanup scheduled task for production deployments
• Component manager to install and uninstall features (provisioning support)
• External service invocation via JMS
• XPath extension support
• Various bug fixes and performance improvements for Apache ODE

WS-HumanTask support is in its early stages. The upcoming releases will provide comprehensive support for Human Tasks. 

Component manager is a cool feature which enables you to install other features to BPS server. For instance, now you can install WSO2 ESB or any other WSO2 products' features to the BPS server itself. 

You can find a sample XPath extension for WSO2 BPS here.

WSO2 BPS is an opensource product. If you found an issue, please raise a jira at https://wso2.org/jira/browse/CARBON under BPEL and HumanTask components.

Please feel free to fix issues and attach patches as well ;)

Deploy Intalio Tempo in Apache Tomcat 5

Now you can try WSO2 BPS 2.0.0 which offers you to deploy human tasks written in WS-HumaTasks standard as well as Business  Processes written in WS-BPEL standard. You can also integrate human tasks within the business  processes according to WS-BPEL4People standard. You can start the server as a stand-alone server, so that no need to go through hard configuration stuff. WSO2 BPS 2.0.0 is open source product. Check release note. 

Recently, I tried to deploy Intalio Tempo in standalone Apache Tomcat 5.5.xx. Tempo provides a ruby build script (tempo_builder.rb) to provide a Tempo integrated in to a Apache Tomcat server. But, what I required was different scenario. I needed to deploy Tempo in my own Tomcat server.

It took few days for me to deploy Tempo in a standalone Tomcat server. Therefore, I thought of sharing the experience I gained, in-order to minimise the pain of people who are in need of deploying Tempo in Tomcat.

Please note well, this document may not be the best way to deploy Tempo in Tomcat. Therefore, please let me know, if you got to know a better way.

First of all, make sure that all the required software are properly installed. Refer INSTALL.txt to find the required software. If you intend to build Apache ODE, then you have to aware about the Buildr and the Java version. In case if you need help on this, refer this post. Make sure that you install the Buildr version 1.3.3 instead of 1.3.2 to support both ODE and Tempo.

checkout the source of Tempo

git clone git://github.com/intalio/tempo.git

Build the Tempo (according to the building instructions of Tempo )

buildr package

In case, if you have installed Buildr in both Ruby and jRuby, make sure to prefix jruby -S or ruby -S to select between the installed Buildrs.

Build the Tempo (to build the dependency jars, BPEL processes and axis2 services)

run the script TEMPO_CHECKOUT/rsc/scripts/tempo_builder.rb

refer INSTALL.txt for further details

From this onwards:
TEMPO_TOMCAT refers to the Tomcat directory created by the tempo_builder.rb script.
TOMCAT_HOME refers to the standalone Tomcat server in which Tempo should be deployed.

Copy the following
TEMPO_TOMCAT/bin/setenv.sh to TOMCAT_HOME/bin
TEMPO_TOMCAT/var to TOMCAT_HOME/

Edit TOMCAT_HOME/conf/context.xml and add the following in to the <context> element

<resourcelink global="jdbc/BPMSDB" name="jdbc/BPMSDB" type="javax.sql.DataSource"/>
<resourcelink global="DeployRegistry" name="registry/DeployRegistry" type="org.intalio.deploy.registry.Registry"/>
<transaction factory="">TomcatGeronimoTxFactory" />

Edit TOMCAT_HOME/conf/server.xml and add the following to the <globalnamingresources> element

<resource name="jdbc/BPMSDB" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource" maxactive="100" maxidle="30" maxwait="10000" username="root" password="password" driverclassname="jdbc.Driver" url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/bpms?relaxAutoCommit=true"/>
<resource name="registry/DeployRegistry" auth="Container" type="registry.Registry" factory="org.intalio.deploy.registry.RegistryObjectFactory" />

Edit TOMCAT_HOME/conf/web.xml and add the following to the element <web-app>

<resource-ref>
<res-ref-name>jdbc/BPMSDB</res-ref-name>
<res-type>javax.sql.DataSource</res-type>
<res-auth>Container</res-auth>
<res-sharing-scope>Shareable</res-sharing-scope>
</resource-ref>

Install MySQL Server and create the database "bpms" and create the schema as in TEMPO_TOMCAT/bpms.sql

create database bpms;
use bpms;
source TEMPO_HOME/bpms.sql;

Copy the MySQL connector jar to TOMCAT_HOME/common/lib

Copy the additional jars in the TEMPO_TOMCAT/common/lib to the TOMCAT_HOME/common/lib

deploy-registry-1.0.3.jar
slf4j-api-1.4.3.jar
slf4j-log4j12-1.4.3.jar
log4j-1.2.15.jar

Deploy Axis2 (1.4.1) and ODE (1.3.2) in your standalone Tomcat Server

Deploy the following web services which are in the TEMPO_CHECKOUT's respective target directories, in Axis2.

tempo-tas-service-5.x.x.x.aar
tempo-tms-service-5.x.x.x.aar

Also deploy the following web services which can be found in TEMPO_TOMCAT/webapps/axis2/WEB-INF/

servicesdeploy-ws-service-1.0.3.aar
security-ws-service-1.0.1.aar

Copy the following jars in TEMPO_TOMCAT/webapps/ode/WEB-INF/lib to the TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/ode/WEB-INF/lib

deploy-api-1.0.3.jar
ode-ext-deploy-1.0.0.jar
tempo-processes-xpath-extensions-6.0.6.jar

Then deploy the following .war files that can be found in respective target directories of TEMPO_CHECKOUT directory.

fds.war
ui-fw.war
wds.war

Then Deploy the xFormsManager.war. It is possible to build it from the source (git clone git://http://github.com/intalio/xforms-manager.git) or download the war file

Now you are ready to use Tempo in your Tomcat server. Please feel free to point out the mistakes in this post as well as your problems regarding deployment.

References:
Tempo-div thread - Is it possible to deploy tempo on tomcat 5.5 and use its runtime
Tempo Installation Guide - INSTALL.txt
Tempo Building Guide - Building
Install Buildr - Buildr for ODE and Tempo
Tempo-div thread which I used to get help - Problem on deploying fds & ui-fw