Mashing-Up Rich User Interfaces for Human-Interaction in WS-BPEL

Abstract

Services computing paradigm together with Web services have significantly promoted the automation of business process in enterprise. Prevalent service composition technologies, such as WS-BPEL and WSCI, provide promising means to deal with machine-to-machine communication. Traditionally, in the phase of business process modeling, there usually require some human-involved tasks. Recent new technologies such as BPEL4People and Human Task begin to consider involving human interaction in business process. However, such approaches still have some limitations. On one hand, they exactly require some extensions of current BPEL standards. As a result, the existing business processes have to be rewritten and redeployed. On the other hand, they yet lack of the development and deployment supports of flexible and reusable user interfaces in business process. In this paper, we address these issues by enabling human interaction in business process with rich web applications. Our approach models human tasks as services, and can be seamlessly integrated to current BPEL without any modifications to existing engine and processes. We further support building human task presentations from service-oriented rich user interfaces. During the process execution, the corresponding task stakeholders can select, configure and compose these reusable and rich UI components according to their own application context.