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SOA and WS-BPEL
When utilized within a Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services are part of a business process determining the logical order of service activities - logical units of work performed by one or more services. Today, the most popular tool for organizing service activities into business processes is Web Services Business Process Execution Language
(WS-BPEL), a language defining an execution format for business processes operating on Web Services. While it is not a trivial task to define a business process definition with WS-BPEL from scratch, using a graphical WS-BPEL tool can significantly simplify this process.
Examples and practice are much more valuable than theory when it comes to building applications using specific development tools. Unlike many other books on SOA in the market, this book is not focused on architecture. Instead, through numerous examples, it discusses practical aspects of SOA and WS-BPEL development, showing you how to apply architecture in practice with the help of PHP, ActiveBPEL open-source engine, and ActiveBPEL Designer - powerful development tools available for free.
Chapter 1 provides an overview of the service-oriented technologies used throughout the book, explaining how these technologies can be utilized in a complementary way.
Chapter 2 explains how to use the PHP SOAP extension when building Web Services to be then utilized within SOA applications.
Chapter 3 provides several examples on using the two most popular databases today MySQL and Oracle, when building data-centric Web Services with PHP. It also explains how to move key underlying logic of a Web Service into the database.
Chapter 4 discusses different ways in which you can combine a set of fine-grained services built with PHP into a composition, without defining an orchestration process. It also discusses how to secure PHP Web Services.
Chapter 5 gets to the heart of the matter, explaining how to combine Web Services into composite solutions with the help of WS-BPEL orchestration language. It also discusses how to deploy WS-BPEL process services to ActiveBPEL open-source engine.
Chapter 6 explains in detail how to compose service-oriented solutions with ActiveBPEL Designer - a free, fully-functional, graphical tool for WS-BPEL process design, debugging, and simulation.
Chapter 7 looks at concurrency, synchronization and asynchronous communication in WS-BPEL. The main focus of this chapter is on how to implement parallel processing of activities within a WS-BPEL process. It also discusses asynchronous interactions between WS-BPEL processes.
The Appendix walks through the steps needed to install and configure the software components required to follow the book examples.
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