Up until this blog the trail has not been GlassFish ESB (Open ESB) specific but this entry will delve into the first of the Business Processes that have been written to back the functionality available within the Cars Online Application. As mentioned previously the Web pages are simply built using HTML / JavaScript / CSS / AJAX and are simply the User façade capable of running on any Web Server using AJAX to access the backing Servlets and hence the underlying Business Processes. Hence we can, if we choose, run this one multiple machines with multiple levels of Security.

The first of the Business Processes described, in this entry, is the Get Delivery Date. One of the key demonstration features of Cars Online was that we can generate a guaranteed Delivery Date based on the Car information selected and that this is dynamic based on previous orders.

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Following on from my introduction to Cars Online this blog entry will take you through the development of the Common Object Model used within the Cars application and explain why it was developed and how it is used. In addition I will look into the key advantages of using this strategy and how it can be used to simplify mappings within your BPEL Processes. Although their are many possible strategies for developing Common Object Models and the concept is, most definitely, not new the one used within Cars Online is based on a number of years experience and tuning and combines full flexibility with a slight amount of, in Relational Database Speak, de-normalisation.

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Whilst working closely with the UK Pre-Sales team building a new version of their Cars Online demo it seemed a good time to document some processes and strategy used within the team to build the new demo. This new version of the demo is built primarily on the GlassFish ESB 2.2 platform and will be designed to leverage existing interfaces but ultimately replace them, where appropriate, with pure GlassFish ESB implementation.

In essence this blog entry will be the first in a trail of entries based around the new Cars Online demonstration that takes the reader through the build and integrations and some of the design patterns used. I expect to show how the solution can interface with a number is different interfaces and hopefully we will also be able to show the same external implementations running on differing application servers.

Therefore this first entry will give an overview of the Cars Online Demonstration and introduce the radically updated web application which now conforms with the Look & Feel seen in the BPEL Monitor and an associated IEP backed BAM Application.

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Now that I have complete switched over to the "Back In Black" format of the monitor I thought it was about time I put together a new "Getting Started" blog entry to match the new screens and explain the exteneded functionality. The previous entry still exist for those using the older style Monitoring application but as mentioned I will not be updating the old style because the main driver, so far, for the development of the Monitoring UI have been the UK Pre-Sales group. 

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In the never search for simplicity and perfection I have written a new Servlet that is designed to simply retrieve the business view of the BPEL based on the BPEL Instance Id which can be easily obtained from the Business Process. This I hope will greatly simplify the task of generating the Business View and make it easier to integrate with web applications, such as the Sun Pre-Sale Cars Online Demo, to provide user feedback.

This blog entry, which will probably take longer to write than the Servlet, will document how to call the new Servlet, the html / xhtml requirements and what we information need from the business process.

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To allow our Pre-Sales people to extend their Cars Online Demo I was ask to document the usage of the AjaxGetBpelProcessSvgServlet Servlet so that it can be called from any web page and return  displayable SVG Code that represents the BPEL Process in a business format. Hence because this information may be useful to the general community I have decide to document it in this blog. I will assume that the reader has read the previous blog "Giving the BPEL Monitor a Business Skin" which describes how to add the a specific images and hence will not be covering that.

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Read the original article at The Crooked Stick

With Look and Feel so important with any application I decided to take a look at the JQuery UI functionality and see if I could leverage this to enhance the overall presentation of the BPEL Monitor. To this end I copied the core Servlet functionality into a new project and decided to rebuild the monitor.jsp page to use JQuery UI and its associated Theme options.

I choose the darkness theme for the new layout simply because it matched the rest of my desktop bu the the pages can be simply modified to use any of the other JQuery Themes.

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Read the original article at The Crooked Stick

Following a number of requests from my pre-sales colleagues I have put together an alternative screen layout for the Monitoring Application although by default I still display the original screen style. To access the new screen you simply need to add /monitor.jsp to the end of the url.

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Although the BPEL Monitor provides a technical user with the process status information this may be too detailed for someone within the business who may be interested in the progress of information through the system and therefore we need to consider an alternative view of the business processes that would be useful to a none technical user. To facilitate this I have leveraged some of the extended functionality available within the BpelSvgGenerator.jar file that allows for the replacement of standard, minimised, icons to be modified for a specific activity. This blog details how to present your business processes in a business manner.

Technical

Business

(Yes this is the new McLaren MP4-12C and as close to one as I will come).

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Read the original article at The Crooked Stick

This is a quick blog entry the documents some new functionality (to help pre-sale) that allows the addition of new extended Icon Sets to an already deployed Monitor application. This assumes that you have the latest version of the war file installed (build date 13th November 2009 or later).

Adding New Icon Sets

With the latest release of the Monitor we are able to customise the Monitor Web Application by adding additional Icon Sets. Once added these Icons can be used instead of the standard shipped Icons. The following step show you how to this can be done:

1. Create an Icon Set of type .png and with the specific names used in the existing Icon Sets. To check you have this correct look in <glassfish domain>/applications/j2ee-modules/BPELMonitorWebApplication/resources/icons/openesb.
2. Create a sub directory of <glassfish domain>/applications/j2ee-modules/BPELMonitorWebApplication/resources/icons to contain your icons (myicons) and copy the icons into it.
3. Edit the <glassfish domain>/applications/j2ee-modules/BPELMonitorWebApplication/iconsets.properties file and add the following:
   
   myicons=My Icons Display Name (This is what will appear in the drop down)
   
   
4. Refresh the monitor page and choose your Icon Set.

Read the original article at The Crooked Stick

Following my previous blog entries on building an Open ESB BPEL Monitor I decided to bring it all together in this blog and provide a simple User Guide that describes the current features. This page will also be available from within the downloaded war file (assuming you can connect to the internet).
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Following on from my previous BPEL Monitoring Blog entries I have tweaked, yet again, the web application and some of the underlying SVG Generation code. These tweaks are relatively minor but hopefully provide the user with some useful additional functionality. A quick 5 minute video can be seen at the end of this blog to demonstrate the functionality now available.
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As mentioned in my previous entry "Extending the Template Based BPEL Document Generator" I would be looking at linking into Adjoovo Spaces as a source for extended BPEL annotation. Whilst looking into this option I decided that what I also needed was the ability to upload BPEL information to the various repositories I was working with and on further investingation decided to extend the NetBeans Module associated within the Documentation Generator (NetBeans Module for BPEL Documentation Generation) to include this functionality.

Because I have done more JDBC and LDAP programming than REST Web Services I decided that I would build the Adjoovo Spaces Upload Action first and this blog entry covers the additional functionality I created and how I accessed the Spaces using the REST API.

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Following a number of discussions with colleagues I have tweaked the BPEL Monitoring Web Page so that it is now an Ajax based solution and hence the page now only exists to layout the data. The functionality originally contained within the BpelSvgRetriever.java has been moved to one of a number of Servlets that will execute during the page display and periodically, as specified in the preferences, to refresh the screen. Once the servlet have executed, asynchronously, the the Ajax callbacks will update contents of the specified <div> blocks.

As a result of these changes the simple monitoring web application has become slicker and in the majority of browsers no longer flickers as a result of the refresh. In addition I have stripped the SVG Generating code out of the main Document generation jar resulting in a smaller packaged war file.

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Following on from my original blog entry "Graphical BPEL Monitoring and Usage Statistics" I have have update the SVG Generation jar as part of my "BPEL Documention" functionality. Therefore this short blog entry will take you through the updates to the interface by building a small lightweight jsp based monitoring application. This application is by no means complete but can be extended to add more functionality although with the upcoming release of the official BPEL Monitor you may want to wait for this.
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