Discussion

Discuss about a Business Process Platform for Transparent Workflow Weaving.

In this modern era it is very important for the organisations to merge their business processes into existing systems and applications which mainly involves considerable amount of effort and needs lot of money. This is where BPM needs to be implemented. BPM keeps the important applications aside while keeping the existing flow of work constant, but it is a costly process. Developing and building an application right from its base is not at all acceptable in the business environment because the practise is not cost effective. So in order to save time it is important to integrate all the existing applications. The integration needs costly connections and a bit of development work in every part of the application as well as the software. As the BPM process are costly and requires subsequent amount of knowledge and time to integrate all the existing applications to the newer work model. So the involvement of high cost makes it difficult for various organisations to adapt BPM (Mondéjaret. al,. 2014). If these techniques are applied in the existing applications it will be very hard to integrate them and their integration will require a subsequent amount of capital along with developing connections in every piece of the software.

In order to reduce the involvement of such high costs and time there is a concept known as workflow weaving. This concept is based on non-intrusive technique. This concept employs transparent integration of the processes that are employed in the business into various existing set of web applications. This novel concept uses AOP (Aspect-Oriented Programming). It helps to intercept transparently the web applications that are there and connects them to the workflow system. MVC (Model-View-Controller) helps to avoid the need of detailed knowledge of the target application. MVC helps to perform black box wrapping interception. This saves to avoid the cost ridden clear box interception models. In order to simplify application integration DSL (Domain Specific Language)is used. It also has the ability to perform workflow weaving transparently. It help to intercept the applications and inject BPM logic into them. This helps the IT technicians to work comfortably without learning AOP as the DSL is simple and it has the ability to enable the required interceptors in MVC applications (Saidaniet. al,. 2015).

In this report there will be a detailed review about BPM and workflow weaving. AOP, MPC and DSL will also be discussed and reviewed. Advantages, conceptual views, solutions and drawbacks will also be discussed and reviewed in detail.

Conceptual view of BPM

Business Process Management (BPM) is a part in business operation management which takes help of various methods to analyse, measure, discover, model, optimize, improve and automate the processes involved in the business (Nitoet. al,. 2014). In simple words it is the combination of processes and methods which is used to manage an organisations business process is known as BPM. BPM is a discipline which provides the platform for the business and technical user to work together. Despite the sharing of the work environment the business analysts are not aware of the end applications and services and how they interoperate.

Now there are some key questions that arises.

1. Are we able to successfully automate the processes by installing them directly in order to execute them in a holistic system?
2. What is the most effective way we can integrate business processes transparently into the organisational applications?

This is a conceptual view of a BPM. Here there are two aspects one is of Business Analysts and the second one is of an IT Technician as both work together in a single work environment. Here the vision is top-down but the approach is bottom-up. The business analyst processes the raw data sets and puts the processed data into the holistic system to get reports. The IT Technician draws up models and codes and enter it into the BPM solution and connects them to the existing applications (Bobbiaet. al,. 2016).

According to Dohring and Zimmermann (2011), the presence of a rich workflow context with respect to a space of larger value leads to the contemporary lacking of BPM resolutions for the instant variables and thereby, the need of one-by-one modelling system takes the substitute place. Many researchers have efficiently identified the value of business rules for certain variables and adaptive supports. However, for the sake of context-dependent event and exception-handling, a more advanced standards based construct is needed (Hallerbach et al,. 2010). Hence, the researcher in their paper has employed the utilization of BPMN adaptation pattern catalogue. The researchers have effectively linked their framework with a met model named vBPMN that is a combinatorial woven format from BPMN2 and R2ML rule language and hence, this allowed the researchers to conveniently define various variable models.  

In addition to this, current business perspectives have had tremendous outflow of model-driven software product lines and this advent had been extreme with respect to research and development implication (La et al,. 2011). Such technological advent has led the companies to implement fast paced customer service, although the manufacturing protocol of the products and/or services still takes the backseat. Model transformation workflows only specifically support simple controlled flows that too with conditional execution. The researchers, in order to ameliorate these issues have effectively implemented the designing and the concurrent use of dedicated and clearly scoped domain specific modelling language (DSML), thereby composing the workflows in a proper manner (Elsner et al,. 2008).  

Proposed view of BPM

According to Braem and Gheysels’ (2007) work on History-Based Aspect Weaving for WS-BPEL Using Padus, workflow languages are mostly preferred over generalized programming languages so that certain business processes can be defined effectively. The researchers have amalgamated the fact that current workflow languages do not necessarily support the separation criteria of the crosscutting concerns and as a result, the workflows have become pretty much difficult to ascertain (Dohring et al,. 2010). The researchers had tried to circumvent the implementation of stateful aspects of aspect oriented programming language and as a result they have effectively introduced high-level, logic-based pointcut language that relied upon the current and the previous state of the workflow execution. The researchers, with respect to business process execution, had proposed a weaving strategy that was based on the finite state automata so that clear weaving of the data set can be performed without any intervention. This research has been stated to be an extension of the Padus AOP language for WS-BPEL.        

There are many drawbacks of the traditional BPM approaches. It is very difficult to understand the existing legacy code (Hanet. al,. 2015). The process is very time consuming and reengineering it is a very challenging task which will drain a lot of resource. Some recent studies has found that the reengineered BPM technique is quite useful and helpful. Still it is very hard to apply those techniques without taking the help from different tools that can understand the behaviour of the application.

It can be clearly seen that the conceptual and the proposed view of the BPM are quite not similar to each other. The proposed view comes with some modifications in it. It has induced the workflow weaving concept in it. The business does his work in the same way that is he puts his processed data inside the holistic system to draw reports from it. But the way the IT Technician used to work in the conceptual model has changed (Cannyet. al,. 2014). Instead of putting models and codes he puts models and workflow weaving into the BPM solution to connect them to the existing applications which can be huge in number.

Workflow weaving is a concept which enables to integrate the business processes with a large variety of corporate webs in a transparent manner. Workflow weaving doesn’t require the IT Technician to have detailed knowledge about AOP. It also avoids the access and modification of the source code of the targeted applications. It also provides an instinctive documentation to both the IT Technician and the business analyst users so that they can represent combined    complex joining semantics and cooperation’s. The workflow weaving has done various contribution in the field of BPM. The contributions are cited below:

• MVC black boxing: It wraps the MVC pattern which are used by the modern web applications.
• AOP/XPI approach: It provides with a clean and generic code interception and introspection of any established MVC framework.
• DSL abstraction: DSL is a high level domain language which is used to simplify the specifications of integration.

Drawbacks of traditional BPM approaches

This is a black box diagram for a MVC pattern (Asoet. al,. 2017). This is extensively used in web frameworks. The MVC patterns that are shown here enables to use the AOP and its facilities to intercept the codes (point M, C, V right), afterwards using the introspection and reflection techniques for obtaining the required information (point M, C, V left). This MVC shows a clear picture along with standardised naming and inheritance rules in order to perform automatic introspection of the given application with ease. Here M (right) is declared for models and attributes, C (right) for enabled controllers and actions. V (right) is declared for the deployed views and navigation rules. Many of the times workflow waiver injects new codes in order to add or remove calculated field to domain classes is shown by M (left). V (left) is used to change the behaviour of the controller actions. C (left) is declared in order to inject the compiled code in the page view versions.

Some aspects of the BPM weaving is whenever the code execution reaches an aspect point cut the interception gets performed (Shibayamaet. al,. 2017). All the aspects of an advice are executed serially first before than during and lastly after. Few of the AOP facilities allows for dynamic weaving of crosscutting concerns during the load and run time operations.   

Workflow weaving to MVC patterns give generic solution that fulfils the requirement of a Black-box. The limitations of workflow weaving to MVC based web applications doesn’t provide any hard challenge which can’t be solved. The challenge becomes tougher if the MVC is not a common architecture pattern.

The XPI or the AOP is a MVC implementation which requires its own point cuts. Crosscut Programming Interfaces (XPI) are the explicit interface which are used to specify point cut declarations (Sadiqet. al,. 2014)

This is a sample coding of MVC AOP/XPI. In this code there are three main parts which are highlighted in green (M, V, C).  A class has been created in the name of public abstract aspect.

In the above coding it can be clearly seen that there is a lot of complexity due to the inheritance of wide range of classes. This is the main cause that the AOP has not been adapted widely due to a huge range of complexity it has. In order to overcome this problem there is a need to develop a simple language which can be easily understandable by the humans. The human readable language is required to abstract the interception facilities. This is where DSL comes into play (Yafenet. al,. 2015). It comes with easy human readable language and doesn’t require any special kind of training to the IT Technician to understand them.

This is a sample DSL coding. It can be seen that the coding is very easy with human understandable language. This coding is very simple compared to XPI/AOP coding. All the three advices that is before instead and after are declared here in the same line. This reduces unnecessary inheritance which in turn reduces the complication of the code (Palesandroet. al,. 2017).

In order to define a model easily and make it readable graphical notations are required to be used. BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) is the standard tool which is used to specify the business processes models. UML (Unified Modelling Language) notations are used to signify the MVC components and interactions among the applications (Hnatkowskaet. al,. 2014).

WWN (Workflow Weaving Notation) make the use of dashed arrow which represents the interception and reaction between processes and applications.

The above diagram clearly depicts the use of UML notations in the MVC application. This is a complete example of how MVC works in the practical field that is in the pet store. It shows with the help of this modelled diagram how the pet store works right from searching to adding to confirming item in the cart to ordering to checkout. After all this processes it comes to the payment page where cancelling items and finally selecting the items which are needed and completing the payment. The notations that are used are described in the side of the model like start, flow gateway, end are shown by various kind of notations (Kalninset. al., 2014).  

The coding of the whole model shown above is done by using DSL without any complexity. The language of the coding is human friendly and can be easily modified in case of minor errors. DSL makes the task very easy and consumes less resource and time.

This is the final workflow revamped model of BPM. Here IT Technicians inputs DSL, XPI/AOP and MVC at a single go in the implicit BPM platform. It connects to the existing applications more efficiently saving time and useful resources.

Implicit BPM has been implemented way back in distributed architecture. It has two separate parts front end and back end. Each of the two parts is connected through web standard mechanism which exposes its own API which in turn allows remote method invocation (Kammerer, 2014).

This diagram shows how the two parts of the implicit BPM works that is the front and the back end.

Conclusion

In this report it has been concluded that the use of explicit or clear-box techniques requires detailed knowledge of the targeted applications. Rewriting and reengineering them for the BPM integration drains a lot of resource and time.

In order to overcome this the use of implicit BPM has been presented. It performs the integration of processes and applications in a transparent manner. As the technique has a very potential it can be applied in different fields.

There can be further improvements that can be done on these systems. The use of DSL extensions can be made. For example complex queries. Real uses and scenarios can be taken into consideration to evaluate the system. For example ITILv3. PaaS cloud storage deployment can make things more secure and cheap.

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