Integrated business-process driven design for service-oriented enterprise applications

Abstract

Purpose: An enterprise application can be quickly built up by service composition. Business process composition is the essence of service composition. To build up such service-oriented enterprise application, the developer needs an integrated design tool. The purpose of this paper is to present and integrated business-process driven design for service-oriented enterprise applications. Design/methodology/approach: In the approach, there are three phases: business environment modeling, business process modeling, and script compiling. Business environment modeling adopts a new modeling technique which combines both the advantages of use case diagram and sequence diagram in UML. Business process modeling builds a concrete model according to business environment modeling. The mapping algorithms from business environment model to business process model are also given. At script compiling phase, the business process model is compiled into several deployable files. And then the paper presents a demonstration which shows how to apply our approach to developing a supply chain management system for the retail industry. Findings: The analysis shows that the approach can meet the requirement of service-composition. The approach can help business expert freely express their business requirement at business environment modeling phase; and help IT expert quickly design service-oriented enterprise application according to business environment model at business process modeling phase. Originality/value: This paper proposes a novel integrated approach to model and implement business-process driven service composition, and presents an integrated tool based Eclipse to implement this approach. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.