IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Get started with IBM BPM > Product overview

Authoring environments


IBM BPM Advanced offers two authoring environments...


Process Designer

Process Designer is available in all editions of the product. IBM BPM Advanced also offers Integration Designer with its associated editors and adapters.

A process is the major unit of logic in IBM BPM. It is the container for all components of a process definition, including services, activities and gateways; timer, message, and exception events; sequence lines, rules, and variables. When you model a process, you are creating a reusable business process definition (BPD). Both Process Designer and Integration Designer can create process models that can contain human tasks.

Process Designer is a graphics-oriented tool used to create a sequence of actions that compose a business process. You can redraw that process over time as circumstances change.

If one or more activities require access to large backend systems or services that provide data for the business process, for example to get information on customers, use Integration Designer. An activity in Process Designer can call a service created in Integration Designer. That service can use mediation flows to transform, route, and enhance data and adapters to get to many backend systems in standard way.

Process Designer focuses on the business process. Integration Designer focuses on automated services to complement the business process.

All Process Designer projects are contained in process applications. You store those process applications and associated artifacts in the Process Center repository. Process applications can share assets that have been placed in toolkits.

IBM BPM provides several user interfaces to enable you to model, implement, simulate, and inspect business processes. You create and manage process applications, toolkits, tracks, and snapshots in the Process Center Console. You can create process models, reports, and simple services in Process Designer. You can run and debug processes in the Inspector. And you can run simulations in the Optimizer.

Process applications developed in Process Designer can at any time be run on the Process Center server or saved to a snapshot and deployed on the Process Server. The same is true of services developed in Integration Designer and associated with process applications.


Integration Designer

Process Designer is available in all editions of the product. IBM BPM Advanced also offers Integration Designer with its associated editors and adapters.

Integration Designer provides editors and aids to help developers create complex automated processes and services. It is available as a component in IBM BPM Advanced or as a stand-alone toolset for other uses.

IBM Integration Designer has been designed as a complete integration development environment for those building integrated applications. Integrated applications are not simple. They can call applications on Enterprise Information Systems (EIS), involve business processes across departments or enterprises, and invoke applications locally or remotely written in a variety of languages and running on a variety of operating systems. The components are created and assembled into other integrated applications (that is, applications created from a set of components) through visual editors. The visual editors present a layer of abstraction between the components and their implementations. A developer using the tools can assemble an integrated application without detailed knowledge of the underlying implementation of each component.

Integration Designer tools are based on a service-oriented architecture. Components are services and an integrated application involving many components is also a service. The services created comply to the leading, industry-wide standards. BPEL processes, which also become components, are similarly created with easy-to-use visual tools that comply to the industry-standard Business Process Execution Language.

In the Integration Designer paradigm, components are assembled in modules. Imports and exports are used to share data between modules. Artifacts placed in a library can be shared among modules.

Modules and libraries can be associated with a process application for use with the Process Center and can be used as services by processes created in Process Designer. In such cases, they can also be deployed with the process application.

Alternatively, modules and libraries can be deployed directly to the test environment or to the Process Server. You can use mediation modules to create mediation flows, which you can deploy to WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus or to the Process Server.

IBM Integration Designer also provides the capability for creating data types and xml maps that can be deployed on the WebSphere DataPower appliance. You can also transfer files to and from WebSphere DataPower.