Developing business process portlets

A business process portlet connects a portal application to a business process.

Development of a business process application involves several components.

1. The business process, including control and data flow.

2. Task processing portlets and process initiation portlets, which provide human interfaces in business processes.

3. A runtime environment, consisting of a WebSphere® Portal server with WebSphere Process Choreographer. .

A business process is a set of activities or tasks that can be performed repeatedly to achieve business objectives. For instance, a business process could support the creation of pages for Web sites. The process could consist of these tasks, which would usually be performed by several different people:

1. Creating a task to build a new Web page for a Web site.

2. Assigning the task to a writer.

3. Writing the Web page.

4. Forwarding the Web page to an editor for approval.

5. Returning the task to the writer for corrections.

6. Forwarding the corrected Web page to an editor for approval.

7. Approval by the editor.

8. Forwarding the task to the Webmaster for publishing to the Web site.

WebSphere Portal does not require WBISF or any process server that is a successor of WebSphere Business Integration Server. To develop business processes for WebSphere Portal, V6.0, and later, WebSphere Integration Developer should be used instead of the Websphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition.

Business process portlets are portlets that interact with the business processing code to provide task processing, process initiation, and other supporting code. Rational® Software Delivery Platform provides the development environment for creating, coding, testing and deploying the business portlets. Business process portlets require some common code to access task or process APIs from the portlet code. Portlet wizards provide options for Basic and Faces portlets that generate the common code. For Faces portlets, visual development features, such as the Page Data view, simplify the process of developing business process portlets.

The steps below provide an idea of the process involved in developing the business application. Additional instructions for using Rational Software Delivery Platform, WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition, and WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation with WebSphere Process Choreographer to develop, test, and deploy business applications can be found in the WebSphere Portal Documentation Library.

1. Design the business process using WebSphere Integration Developer

2. Once the business process has been unit tested, export the classes as JAR files (to be used in Rational Software Delivery Platform), and export the application as an EAR file (to be installed on a WebSphere Portal server).

3. Using Rational Software Delivery Platform, create a portlet project with business process integration. See Creating a business process portlet project for details.

4. Import the JAR files into the new project.

   1. From the Project Explorer view, highlight the

      /WebContent/WEB-INF/lib directory in the portlet project, right-click and select

      Import.

   2. Import the JAR files.

5. Develop the task processing portlet using the following APIs:

   • Task API

   • TaskUI Manager API

   • Property broker API (Only for portlets that use the IBM® portlet API; it is not required for JSR 168 or for JSR 286 API portlets.)

   Javadoc for these APIs is included with WebSphere Portal.

6. Develop the process initiation portlet.

7. Install the business process EAR file on a properly configured WebSphere Portal server.

8. Deploy the portlets to the WebSphere Portal server.

 

Related concepts

Process initiation helper classes

Task processing helper classes

 

Related tasks

Creating a business process portlet project

Enabling business process portlets that use the Basic portlet model

Adding data access to business process portlets

Creating user interfaces for business processes

Inserting images in portlet JSP files

 

Related reference

WebSphere Portal Documentation Library

---