[Back]

O. Selinger:
"OpenESB for Web Process Integration";
Supervisor: R. Pichler; Institut für Informationssysteme, Arbeitsbereich Datenbanken & Artificial Intelligence, 2009; final examination: 08-30-2009.

Web Process Integration constitutes a procedure for a seamless integration of Web Processes into the enterprise´s processes. Within a Web Process, contents from web sources are gained and transformed to meaningful and customizable data structures.
These techniques bear a meaning especially for enterprises. These techniques bring companies competitive advantages through integrating processes easily for gathering hard to obtain information over several web portals. Usually these processes have to be executed manually. So a situational need for information can easily be met by wrapping these contents and provide the information to the enterprises´ business systems and processes. The information delivery process runs completely automated to feed the business systems with information when it is needed. The information flow runs from the outside into the enterprise´s systems, but can also take place in the opposite direction.

The idea of this procedure is a common access to any web content. The heterogeneous information sources of the Internet should be made easily accessible and able to cumulate, aggregate and structure. So data sources are not, as usually, constraint to web services, instead the whole World Wide Web is used as database. Contemplating Web Process Integration, the operation method of the information delivery process procures to be a workflow. The execution of the steps like data extraction, transformation, filtering and so on looks like a chain of tasks needed for information delivery. These tasks are arranged in a determined control flow and must be completed by a kind of a service.

This master thesis ties in with a new trend towards Service Oriented Architecture based Mashups and describes a proof of concept of using a standardized service-based platform to build Situational Applications for Web Process Integration in enterprise environments. The non SOA-based solution of Lixto serves as orientation for a new concept of a SOA-based platform to develop Situational Applications. The most important requirements and demands were cumulated to design and implement a server application (WPIServer) for the creation of Web Processes. An Enterprise Service Bus was chosen as platform because it combines Service-Oriented Architecture with Business Process Management (BPM) which enables arrangements of SOA-services in a workflow-based process. Hence, the Enterprise Service Bus OpenESB was adapted to fit in the requirements assembled for Web Process Integration tools. As an Enterprise Service Bus is already workflow based, a framework around was built to use OpenESB as base. A lot of features that are necessary to build a Web Process come out-of-the box from OpenESB like XPath support, transformation support via the Extensible Stylesheet Language, monitoring of processes, intervention, fault handling, compensation actions and so on. But some features are missing, like sending emails with attachments, comparing of data and creating files like PDF. The missing functions are provided by the WPIServer application. The evolved application glues all those features and technologies together and enables a Service Developer to fulfill almost all demands for building a Web Process. How far the OpenESB and today´s development tools support and solve Web Process Integration and where the Service Designer has to manipulate, shows an extensive reference example built on the implemented WPIServer application.