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Business Processes Made Simple with SOA
Build business processes in a snap using WebLogic Workshop 8.1
by David Hritz

Posted May 24, 2004

Building service oriented architectures (SOAs) is now a simple task within BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1. BEA provides a mechanism for visually creating complex business processes and services. Over the span of the next few pages, I will guide you step by step in creating a process for a mortgage brokerage. Hopefully, this will provide insight into how an SOA is constructed that leverages the power of WebLogic Workshop.

The premise is that a process is made available for any number of subsystems to access a payment process, which calculates a monthly payment based on a loan amount and term. Brokerages usually deal with numerous lending institutions for the actual loan. In our case, our brokerage will work with a national bank and a local bank. Both of these institutions have made available a Web service that we can use to retrieve the current mortgage rate. Our business process will incorporate these services into its logic, giving the user the most up-to-date information possible.

Getting Started
Before we get started with the business process, we'll need to build the Web services on which the business process relies. Not only will our services return the current rate for an institution, they will also return its name. For the purposes of this example, the current rate will be calculated by randomly choosing a value from a statically defined rate array. The following steps will lead you through the process of creating the needed application, project, and services within Workshop.

First, we need to create an empty application:

• Choose File > New > Application… and the New Application dialog appears.
• Choose Empty Application and name it Brokerage.
• Click Create.