Using ActiveVOS
ActiveVOS empowers line-of-business project teams to create composite business applications which incorporate people, processes and services, making their businesses more agile and effective by:
- Seamlessly integrating people and system interactions with a drag and drop pallet
- Being ideal for non-stop mission critical applications
- Being entirely built on standards
ActiveVOS supports the entire application lifecycle by delivering the means to develop, test and deploy business services and workflows that include human tasks using the Business Process Execution Language and BPEL4People open standards. ActiveVOS delivers everything you need -- and nothing more -- to make 100% standards-based service orchestrations and business process management, or BPM, a reality.
ActiveVOS features are described in the table below. Use the "topics on this page" box to quickly switch to a section in the table.
Develop – Visually orchestrate human activities and services
| Feature | Benefits |
| Drag and drop orchestration | Simple, code-free and error-free service orchestration of people, processes and services |
| Standards-based orchestration BPEL and BPEL Extensions for People (BPEL4People) support | Protects your investment in skills development that you can leverage for your next project |
| Service discovery:
Built-in means to discover enterprise services |
Reuse enterprise assets |
| Manage and use external service references:
Manages interface and schema references to compare and updates from partners |
Helps you manage and control the impact of change |
| Project Asset Management: Cataloging of WSDL and schema assets, tracking of dependencies, and automatic validation use by a process |
Eases the management of a complex set of related assets and reduces errors |
| Service interface generation from data representation: Generates service interface from data represented by XML data sample and XML schema |
Help you quickly integrate non-Web services |
| Customized palette and BPELets creation: BPEL code reuse |
Create BPELets to re-use a grouping of activities in other processes Significantly shortens design time by reusing common components and patterns allowing team to be reusable components |
| Tasked-based tabbed property sheets: Declarative tabbed property sheets that assists developers through common tasks |
Eases development tasks |
| Custom functions extensibility: Ability to create custom functions implemented as a collection available for use during design, analysis and runtime execution to support for example the execution of external logic |
Extend ActiveVOS to meet your needs |
| Built-in static analysis: Auto-generation of a problem list for incomplete or invalid process constructs, enabling the developer to fix problems without hunting for them |
Saves a tremendous amount of time |
| Visual depiction of partner interaction: Swimlane display of each partner’s role in the process to show a service is being invoked, received from or replied to |
Documents and describes a composite business application to partners |
| Built-in identity and email services | Simplifies integration of people and processes |
| Rules Support: Built-in integration for rule engine support |
Separates orchestration logic from business policy and reduces the effort of adapting to changing business needs |
| Customizable task inbox: BPEL Extension for People and WS- Human Task customizable implementation. Customize task and notification detail presentation to your needs |
Does not lock you in to a prescribed view of a process |
| Simulate end-to-end process execution using sample data | Improves test coverage and quality |
| Integrated debugging: Local and remote debugging of a process running on a server. Set breakpoints, step through or run the process. Set default values and track process state Identical techniques used in production to fix a problem with the ability to suspend, resume and terminate processes. |
Faster project delivery with improved responsiveness to problem resolution in production |
Test – Integrated development and quality environment
| Feature | Benefits |
| Integrated development and quality environment: Developers and QA teams use a common designer environment and framework, reducing unit and integration testing effort |
Faster project delivery, improves quality and reduces risks of problems in production |
| Scenario and regression test generation through recorded simulations: Recording and replay of end-to-end process execution simulation with the ability to save the simulation as a “BUnit” test case |
Faster project delivery, improves quality and reduces risks of problems in production |
| Unit and scenario testing - “BUnit” testing: Run BUnit test cases and suites directly from the Designer. Integrated with local and remote debugging. Supports off-line unit testing |
Improved agility and ability to adapt to change through regression testing |
| Data-driven testing and management: Create sample test data to test paths in your process. ActiveVOS Designer automatically generates sample data for complex types. During simulation and unit testing, validate various paths using different data |
High developer productivity in retesting after a change has been made |
Deploy – Push-button deployment
| Feature | Benefits |
| Wizard-based deployment and packaging: Deployment wizards guide you to provide endpoint references and policy assertions for services used in your process. A process deployment descriptor provides error-free techniques for binding your services |
Ease of use and speeds up deployment |
| Automated deployment: Process can be automatically and remotely deployed to a target server either from ActiveVOS Designer or via an ANT script |
Ease of deployment to and across multiple environments |
| Deployment management: Administrative page permits uploading of the deployment package or use of a Web service for accepting the deployment package. Direct administrative API call can be used for custom deployment |
Web Service and Java APIs allow quick and easy integration in existing configuration management infrastructure |
| Policy-based configuration: Supports a rich set of enterprise configuration options through WS-Policy assertions. Support for WS-Security – Authentication, Encryption & Signature; SAML 1.1; WS-Reliable Exchange – guaranteed message delivery; and retry quality of service policy |
Rich runtime configuration capabilities allow runtime behavior to be configured and not coded |
| Policy-based configuration: Runtime configuration through policy is declared and not coded |
Frees developers from having to code runtime behavior. Enables deployment staff to reconfigure without requiring code changes. |
| Built-in integration and connectivity: Binding support for SOAP/HTTP, JMS and REST |
Code-free integration without the need of an ESB |
| Custom invoker handler framework for EJB and JAVA class invocation | Developers are not locked in to strictly using services and can implement orchestration using a broad set of pre-existing components |
| Endpoint management: URN mapping – Dynamically assign endpoint address on server |
Reduced deployment time and ability to quickly adapt to a reconfiguration (e.g. migration from development to test/QA and to production server) |
| Advanced endpoint location services: Partner addressing schemes to support a myriad of use cases:
|
Late endpoint resolution permits dynamic assignment of the address. Increased ability to adapt to changing conditions e.g. add new partners |
Operate – Enterprise reliability and scalability
| Feature | Benefits |
| Visual design and operational views: Consistent rendering from design to runtime, enabling ease of design and maintenance throughout the process lifecycle |
Significantly reduces operational troubleshooting efforts. Reduces administration complexity |
| Troubleshooting and process execution visibility: Manual operational control to visually review and remediate process or service errors Operators can suspend execution, examine the contents of in-flight messages, and visually troubleshoot problems |
Graceful handling of exceptions avoiding unnecessary and costly remediation |
| Process exception management: suspend, remote debugging Allows the process to be suspended at the faulting activity rather than be terminated abnormally as well as providing alerts of their occurrences This capability can be made available to all processes or specific processes allow an organization to decide how to handle exceptions. Once caught and suspended the problem can be remedied via the Administration Console or remote debugging. |
Graceful handling of avoidable failure Manual and programmatic operational control provide to review and remediate critical process errors without forcing process termination |
| Integrated with debugging facilities: Allows a problem in production to be debugged using breakpoints and stepping through the process. |
Improves the ability to react to problems in production |
| Server-based process correlation: Use of server-side correlation eliminates the need to developers to handle message correlation |
Ease of development |
| Process persistence management: All process, state and variable (message) data can be stored to database to permit:
|
Guaranteed process reliability in server outage situation
Improved performance and throughput |
| Retry Policy: The retry quality of service policy directs the server runtime to deal with outages and unavailability of a service |
Protects against needlessly
terminating a crucial long running process or human tasks. “Self-healing” dealing with temporary service outages |
Change - Process Versioning
| Feature | Benefits |
| Advanced and where-used searching: Advanced find capabilities allows for comprehensive searching to locate namespaces, messages, and other elements Where-used controls greatly simplify re-factoring and understand the impact of change |
Easily re-factor projects: Test
early – design right. Simplifies and speeds the ability to make changes |
| Process Versioning: Permits deployment of multiple versions of the same process without needing to bring down server to make process upgrade, maintenance and fixes |
Agile change management; near real-time fixes possible |
| Online deployment of new process versions: Hot-deploy changes and selectively chose when to apply an update either in the future or in-flight. Run versions side-by-side; terminate running processes to force a change; or allow pre-existing processes run to completion |
Non-stop Operation Deploy processes with the confidence that future changes will not disrupt existing operations. |
| Process monitoring: Operational control – suspend/retry allows human (and programmatic process override) |
Business application monitored and managed
Manual override possible in exception management and process error recovery |
ActiveVOS Runtime
| Capability | Description |
| ActiveVOS advanced features | Native support for J2EE: BEA WebLogic
Server®, IBM® WebSphere® Application Server, JBoss® Application
Server as well as Apache Tomcat Enterprise performance, scale and reliability needed for mission-critical deployments through clustering Brings SOA process management and workflow to your enterprise deployments. Processes are managed within your existing server and middleware infrastructure |
| Scalability | Achieve enterprise performance and scale needed for mission-critical deployments through clustering Automatic scaling and load balancing under management of J2EE infrastructure |
| High Availability | Achieve enterprise reliability to fail-over and clustering |
| Manageability | WSDM-MUWS support |
| Monitoring | Server monitoring (system metrics)
Managed events/notifications |
| Administrative APIs | API access to:
|
| Rich SAML 1.1 support |
|
| Comprehensive JMS Support |
|
Built on Standards
| Application | Standards |
| Interface/Definition | WSDL, XML Schema |
| Protocols | SOAP over HTTP/HTTPS, SOAP/Plain XML over JMS, REST, JAVA/EJB Invocation, WS-Reliable Messaging |
| Orchestration | BPEL 1.1/2.0, BPEL Extension for People, WS-Human Task |
| Security/Identification/ Authentication | WS-Security, SAML, LDAP |
| Governance | WS-Policy |
| Expression Languages | XPath, XQuery, XSLT and JavaScript |
| Attachments | SOAP with Attachments |
