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BPM and service-oriented architecture
SOA has been around for quite some time now. It is a software design principle based on
creating discrete pieces of software that expose an application's functionality as services to
other systems. It promotes the creation of highly decoupled and self-contained units of
functionalities called services. They can live alone without external requirements, and they
expose well-defined interfaces to access a specific functionality.
When you create a new application, you can use the previously exposed services. This will
allow pieces of software to be decoupled, easily maintained and reused, and exchanged in
an easier way than if they were embedded in an existing application.
As you can see in the preceding figure, we can create applications by composing and reus-
ing different sets of services. Each service provides a specific functionality that each ap-
plication uses. In this example, we can see how both the use case service and Auditing ser-
vice are being used by two different applications.
BPM systems relate to service-oriented architectures by either BPM systems exposing ser-
vices (that can be called by other applications to handle the creation of the process and sig-
naling) or by handling service executions with processes. Since services are to be con-
sidered as external interactions, we can create WorkItemHandlers to invoke different
kinds of services.
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