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.

  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 Process Choreographer, a component of WebSphere Portal v5.1, provides a runtime environment for processes that are modeled using the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS or BPEL). BPEL is a Web services standard for business process composition. WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition provides a process editor for creating business processes, written using BPEL, to be run on WebSphere Portal v5.1 (with the proper configuration).

Business portlets are portlets that interact with the business processing code to provide task processing, process initiation, and other supporting code. Rational Developer v6.0 provides the development environment for coding, testing and deploying the business portlets.

The steps below give you an idea of the process involved in developing the business application. Complete instructions for using Rational Developer v6.0, WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition, and WebSphere Portal with WebSphere Process Choreographer to develop, test, and deploy business applications can be found in the WebSphere Portal Documentation Library for v5.1, under Integrating your business > Integrating business processes.

  1. Create the business process using WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition.

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

  3. Using Rational Developer, create a portlet project. See Creating portlets and portlet projects.

  4. Import the JAR files into Rational Developer.

    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

    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 v5.1 server.

  8. Deploy the portlets to the WebSphere Portal server.