<<The involvement of people in service compositions is a relatively new facet of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), expanding the ways software can model how humans work and interact in a business. This article describes functions offered by the Human Task Manager of IBM WebSphere® Process Server and their use in a portal. User interfaces for the Service-Oriented Architecture
Total automation of business processes, while desirable, in practice is unachievable, because certain activities requiring human judgment or human expertise -- such as the manual handling of exceptional situations or the approval of requests -- are always performed by people. In the context of the overall business process, a human task is a service like any other task, except that it is realized by a human activity (instead of a program) and performed by a person (instead of a computer). Thus, within the SOA programming model, human activities can be realized as Web services. When invoked, the service notifies an individual of a task to do and passes the input data in an appropriate form. After the task is completed and there is a result, the service returns to its caller, passing the result as output data. That the result actually involved work by a person may be completely transparent to the caller. The scenario employs asynchronous invocation to support long-running services; a remote procedure call (RPC)-style synchronous invocation is not suitable for human tasks (or any other long-running service). Rendering a human task as a Web service has the additional advantage that automation, or a combination of automated and human steps, can be substituted for the human implementation without recoding the remainder of the business process. This is not to suggest that human workers will be replaced by software or that future computers will command human slaves! Rather, modeling a human-implemented activity as a Web service is a reasonable design choice, because the alternative performing several steps in a business process choreography and simply stopping whenever human expertise is needed, then restarting the choreography at a later step, without any logical connection between the two disconnected choreography sequences has many obvious deficiencies.>> You can find this tutorial at: <http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa- progmodel8/?ca=dnt-645> [let's see if this bracketing works, Gregg] Gervas ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Most low income households are not online. Help bridge the digital divide today! http://us.click.yahoo.com/cd_AJB/QnQLAA/TtwFAA/NhFolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-architecture/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
