Why Do We Need Business Process Management? - jBPM6 Developer Guide - page 19

sions, communication, transactions, and so on). Depending on the amount
of concurrent process executions, this could cause a performance issue.
• The third option is creating an understandable wrapper model that abstracts the
legacy model, data sources, and communication strategies required by your busi-
ness processes' model objects. Its pros and cons are follows:
◦ Pros : You can map any outdated terms or concepts to a business process'
relevant names and structures, and define underlying strategies to fetch
information from external systems or to produce the needed data.
◦ Cons : Writing and maintaining the integrity of the wrapper model will
take time, and an expert on both models will have to worry about keeping
everything in sync.
Once you define and know how to get and update information from your business model,
you will need to bind each bit of information with the correspondent activity in your pro-
cess. We usually do this with an expression language that allows us to express, in a declar-
ative way, the information that we need without saying where it can be obtained. One ex-
ample of this could be #{ambulance.doctor.speciality} .
This expression will be evaluated at runtime, and an internal mechanism will be used to
retrieve the information.
Coordination and orchestration of activities
The business process provides us with a set of activities that need inputs and produce out-
puts. As technical developers, we will have to provide technological assets to provide
such functionality, from creating form renderers for human interactions to creating con-
nectors to external web services and transformations for external models to our entity
model. In Chapter 7 , Defining Your Environment with the Runtime Manager , we will ana-
lyze all the technical requirements to implement user interfaces, and in Chapter 10 , Integ-
rating KIE Workbench with External Systems , we will review all the relevant details about
system-to-system interactions and the mechanisms that we need to know in order to keep
everything simple.
Having a clear vision of the components that we need to implement and having a stand-
ardized and conceptually coherent way of interaction will make our life easier, and we
will end up with simple applications that are easy to maintain.
By the time we finish this stage, our business processes will be executable. This will allow
us to test, verify, validate, and simulate the process behavior. For the next iterations, this
stage becomes unnecessary, and the only thing that changes between one implementation