WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation

IBM WebSphere® Business Integration Server Foundation V5.1, used in conjunction with WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition V5.1 for development, delivers a next generation integration platform optimized for building and deploying composite applications that extend and integrate your existing IT assets.

Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) defines a model and a grammar for describing the behavior of a business process based on interactions between the process and its partners. Support for BPEL4WS includes:

• Application assembly, deployment, and runtime support for BPEL4WS-based business processes

• Intuitive drag-and-drop tools to visually define the sequence and flow of BPEL4WS business processes

• A visual business process debugger to step through and debug BPEL4WS business processes

• Compensation support to provide transaction "rollback" like support for loosely coupled business processes that cannot be undone automatically by the application server

• Flexibility to develop processes using a top-down, bottom-up, or meet-in-the-middle approach

• A standards-based XML Path Language (XPATH) / Extensible Stylesheet Transformation (XSLT) transformation wizard to map data between nodes in a process

• Integrated fault handling to provide an easy and integrated means of performing in-flow exception handling

• A visual condition builder allowing you to easily direct the execution of BPEL4WS processes

• Support for including Java snippets and artifacts as part of a business process

Human workflow support expands the reach of BPEL4WS to include activities that require human interaction as steps in an automated business process. Business processes involving human interaction are interruptible and persistent (a person may take a long time to complete the task) and resume when the person completes the task. Human workflow support includes:

• Staff activity nodes to represent a step in a business process that is performed manually

• Ability to assign people (e.g. your direct reports) to specific instances of a process via staff queries that are resolved at runtime using an existing enterprise directory

• Graphical browser-based interface for querying, claiming, working with, completing, and transferring work items to another user

• Work item management support for managing the creation, transfer and deletion of work items

• Dynamic setting of duration and calendar attributes for staff activities

• Dynamic setting of staff assignment via custom attributes

Support for building Web applications and BPEL4WS business processes that integrate with back-end systems including:

• Integrated tool support for using J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA) 1.0 resource adapters to access back-end systems

• Enhanced tool integration for JCA adapters with tool plug-in extensions (available from IBM and business partners)

• Easy to use tools for creating services out of JCA resource adapters and including those services as part of a BPEL4WS business process

• Enhanced JCA 1.0 resource adapters included for CICS®, IBM Host On-Demand and IBM IMS® (for development use only)

• Sophisticated wizards to manage the low-level data handling requirements for JCA resource adapters

• Wizards to quickly and simply expose CICS or IMS programs as enterprise services including the ability to import definitions from COBOL, C structures, CICS basic mapping support (BMS), and IMS Message Format Service (MFS) definitions

• Support for the entire suite of WebSphere Business Integration Adapters

Business rule beans offer a powerful real-time framework for defining, executing, and managing business rules that encapsulate business policies that vary based on changes in the business environment. For example, a simple business rule might be, "If a customer's shopping cart is greater than $X, then offer a Y% discount." Business rule support includes:

• Easy to use tools for defining, executing, and managing business rules

• Cheat sheet for defining business rules

• Update business rules at runtime using a straightforward user interface without the need to bring the application or server down

• Organize business rules into logical categories using the business rules beans framework

• Define a start and end date for when the rule is effect

Accelerate large-scale application development by taking advantage of the latest innovations that build on today's Java™ 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standards. Programming model extensions include:

Programming Model Extensions

• Asynchronous beans - enables J2EE applications to decompose operations into parallel tasks in order to speed performance

• Startup beans - enables J2EE applications to execute business logic automatically, whenever an application starts or stops normally

• Last participant support - provides automated coordination for transactions that include two-phase commit resources and a single one-phase commit resource

• Internationalization service - allows customers to build applications that can automatically adjust to handle global audiences

• Work areas - provides the ability to efficiently share information across a distributed application

• Scheduler service - enables tasks to be executed at a requested time; when used in conjunction with asynchronous beans, it enables batch processing applications within J2EE

• Activity session services - provides the ability to extend the scope of and group multiple local transactions

• Dynamic query service - provides the ability to pass in and execute SQL query statements at runtime

• WSGW Filters - allows customer to write filters for the Web Services Gateway such as filters that select a target service and port, capture Web service invocation information, or handle exceptions

• Object pools - enables an application to avoid creating new Java objects repeatedly

• Container Managed Messaging - offers automated support for outbound (as well as inbound) messaging

• Distributed Map - offers an interface to enable J2EE applications and system components to cache and share Java objects by storing a reference to the object in the cache in order to improve performance

• Container Managed Persistence over anything - extends the existing J2EE Container Managed Persistence (CMP) framework to support any backend system or service that supports create, retrieve, update, and delete (CRUD) methods

Quality of Service

• Application profiling - allows customers to carefully optimize the performance of their EJB CMP 2.0 applications without impacting application source code by delivering a mechanism for instructing the same component to interact with the runtime infrastructure, such as a database, differently depending on the application that calls it

• Backup Cluster Support - enables customers to automatically configure their system to set up a back-up cluster of servers if the primary cluster fails without having to write any code

WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation V5.1 builds on the WebSphere Application Server to provide a premier J2EE and Web services technology-based application platform for deploying enterprise Web services solutions for dynamic e-business on demand.

WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation v5.1 includes all of the features available in WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment V5.1 including:

• J2EE 1.3 support (support for some features planned for J2EE 1.4)

• Full XML support

• Full Web services support

• Support for private UDDI registries

• Web Services Gateway

• Database Connectivity

• Embedded HTTP server

• Web server plug-ins

• Authentication and authorization for secure access to Web resources

• Single sign-on and support for LDAP

• Java Message Service (JMS) support

• Dynamic caching

• IBM Tivoli Performance Viewer

• Integration with third-party performance management tools

• Browser-based administration and workload management

• Intelligent workload distribution across a cluster

• Failure bypass

• Clustering support

• Migration support

WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition V5.1 builds on the WebSphere Studio development environment to provide a best-in-class integrated development environment for building, testing, integrating and deploying J2EE applications, Web services, and business processes.

WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition V5.1 includes all of the features available in WebSphere Studio Application Developer V5.1.1 including:

• Eclipse-based user interface

• BPEL4WS development environment

• J2EE development environment

• Java development environment

• Web services development environment

• XML development environment

• Relational database tools

• Web development environment

• Team development

• Server tools for testing and deployment

• Tracing, monitoring, and performance analysis tools

• Debugger