ActiveVOS Provides an All-in-One, Standards-Based Development Environment

by eWEEK

Here, a business analyst uses standard BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) to document a business process or application. Current business process models drawn in Microsoft Visio or UML (Unified Modeling Language) can be imported into ActiveVOS BPMN Designer. ActiveVOS also permits the business analyst to simulate the effects of people and resource availability on the model to determine throughput and capacity requirements. When complete, the BPMN model can be transformed into an SOA-compliant application that can be run on almost any application server.

To execute business processes on app servers, ActiveVOS uses BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). A developer can simply drag Web services onto the canvas from the Participants View (lower-left pane), and ActiveVOS BPEL Designer automatically generates standards-compliant BPEL. ActiveVOS permits both machine and human tasks to be combined in a single application, using the BPEL4People specification to add standards-based workflow.

ActiveVOS has a sophisticated deployment environment that eases management of BPMS. Detailed log information about the status of every running application is available to users in the ActiveVOS console. Note that the graphical representation of the process, including its current state, is shown in the same visual style in which the developer originally designed the application-with the addition of showing which steps have completed and which were or were not executed. In this illustration, the ActiveVOS Process Rewind capability is shown. Process Rewind allows authorized users to go back to an earlier state in the process and restore all the data to the state it was in at that moment.

Integrated BAM (business activity monitoring) and BI (business intelligence) capabilities are part of the integrated ActiveVOS BPMS. The system includes flexible, standard Eclipse BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools)-based reporting and graphing. In this illustration, some of the supplied, out-of-the-box graphs are shown, including reports showing top running processes by number and by time. The ActiveVOS console also allows custom reports to be created and added to the console.