Process modeling in Web applications

Abstract

While Web applications evolve towards ubiquitous, enterprise-wide or multienterprise information systems, they face new requirements, such as the capability of managing complex processes spanning multiple users and organizations, by interconnecting software provided by different organizations. Significant efforts are currently being invested in application integration, to support the composition of business processes of different companies, so as to create complex, multiparty business scenarios. In this setting, Web applications, which were originally conceived to allow the user-to-system dialogue, are extended with Web services, which enable system-to-system interaction, and with process control primitives, which permit the implementation of the required business constraints. This article presents new Web engineering methods for the high-level specification of applications featuring business processes and remote services invocation. Process- and service-enabled Web applications benefit from the high-level modeling and automatic code generation techniques that have been fruitfully applied to conventional Web applications, broadening the class of Web applications that take advantage of these powerful software engineering techniques. All the concepts presented in this article are fully implemented within a CASE tool.