Oracle BPM Architecture

Oracle BPM Runtime  

Oracle BPM Runtime or “service infrastructure” provides the internal message transport infrastructure for connecting components and enabling data flow. The service infrastructure is responsible for routing messages along the wire connections between services, service components, and references.  

BPEL Service Engine  

For process orchestration of synchronous and asynchronous BPEL processes. 

BPMN Service Engine  

For creating and modeling business processes using Business Process Management Notation and Modeling (BPMN). The BPEL, BPMN and Process Core (provided shared services for both BPMN and BPEL engines) are commonly called as BPM engine. According to Oracle documentation, BPMN Service Engine is actually an extension of the existing BPEL Service Engine and as such it leverages the core infrastructure of the BPEL. The BPMN Service Engine leverages JPA/EclipseLink to store/recover the state of a process instance in the SOA Infrastructure dehydration store maintained by a database and to persist audit records that are created in the course of running a process. MDS APIs are used to retrieve metadata Information about the BPMN Process Model and other BPM project artifacts like the Business Catalog.  

Business Rules Engine  

For making a decision or for processing based on business rules.  

Human Workflow Engine 

For modeling a human task (for example, manual order approval) that describes the tasks for users or groups to perform as part of an end-to-end business process flow.

This engine is also used extensively in this tutorial. The details of its services are shown below.

We can see that the Human Task Workflow Engine are a major set of SOA components to manage a wide range of human related services, including routing, roles and permission, security, timers, interaction with user interface, and notification.

User Interface and Data Control

Another important aspect of BPM application is the interaction with users which is implemented by Oracle ADF. Oracle ADF runs on top of Java Server Faces (JSF) which abstracts HTML and Java Servlet technologies with web components.

 

 

The prominent contribution of Oracle ADF is the ADF Model layer which includes Data Control and Bindings as shown above. Other mechanism is primarily based on JSF infrastructure. The main idea of data control and data bindings is to simplify the process of binding UI elements with various data source in a declarative manner. Developers don’t need to bother with details of various data sources but only work with a common facilities provided by the Data Controls editor in Oracle JDeveloper. We will work with this facility during the human task implementation.
For BPM technology, Oracle provides a special data control called BPM data control which interacts with both BPMN and Human Workflow Engine. It hides the complexity in dealing with these two engines and ease the development efforts.
However, it is noted that Oracle ADF is a huge and complex technology stack on top of JSF, which requires a relatively steep learning curve.