Application Development for IBM WebSphere Process Server 7 and Enterprise Service Bus 7 Review

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Application Development for IBM WebSphere Process Server 7 and Enterprise Service Bus 7 ReviewFirst and foremost, the book "Application Development for IBM WebSphere Process Server 7 and Enterprise Service Bus 7" from Packt is a worthy investment for honing your skills on application development with IBM WebSphere Integration Developer V7 for IBM WebSphere Process Server 7 and Enterprise Service Bus 7. You may expect a pleasant and instructive reading experience till the chapter 7 and later on in the chapters 10-11. The others made me wish I'd never read them. They're more concerned with administrative than development tasks, often lengthy and boring. The book assumes that a reader is a complete beginner in developing applications with these tools and should be a compulsory reading assisting in any development course on the topic.
As a certified IBM WebSphere specialist working for IBM Poland I work with the products that made up the book's title - IBM WebSphere Process Server and IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus - helping clients to use it effectively. If they're troubled or stuck with an issue with these products that's the job I'm up for.
While preparing for the IBM Certified Solution Developer - WebSphere Integration Developer V6.2 and V7 certifications, I came across the book and after having glanced at its table of content I had no doubts to read it. And I'm glad I did, however some pitfalls showed up along the way.
Given that it's made up of over 500 pages it inevitably took me a while to fully comprehend its content. I marked many sections to come back later for more in-depth self-learning. There're many and that's why I found the book very helpful and informatory.
I always wanted to have a book I could suggest for learning the flagship products of IBM WebSphere BPM product family, and after those 500 pages I came to conclusion that there's none possible to come soon if ever as it would've contained more pages to become a comprehensive guide on the topic. The book "Application Development for IBM WebSphere Process Server 7 and Enterprise Service Bus 7" from Packt helped me to become more productive with the tools, but experience tells me there's way more to call it fully complete. Despite this, the book deserves its place on the bookshelf of any seasoned WebSphere BPM specialist.
Each chapter begins with a mindmap that introduces what's presented. Quite a few screenshots and links were for 6.2 that I found a bit annoying.
The 1st chapter introduces the concepts of IBM BPM and ESB. It does its job well. Even if I thought I knew about these concepts quite a lot I found the reading worthy. Figures, screenshots, images, a mindmap and different layout techniques made it a very pleasant activity.
The following chapter 2. was around 30 pages and was quite boring. I think it should not have been included in a book about application development.
The chapter 3. was definitely a worthy reading, but should've been divided to two chapters with the first one about theory and the other about practice.
The following chapters 4-6 were quite intensive on theory and practice. They're often too detailed and lengthy, and therefore a bit boring for unprepared readers.
The chapter 7. and on put more focus on the SFA sample application and further enhancing it with cross-cutting concerns like security, performance tuning and other non-development-centric aspects of building and later administering SOA and BPMS applications. The chapter 7. was so boring that I faced a great pain to finish it. I strongly advise not to read it.
The chapter 8. was not very technical. I'd recommend leaving it out if you're looking for technical material.
The chapter 9. contains too much non-technical details, often repeated to make the flow structured according to the given writing procedure. Many typos. Quite frankly, it was worth reading, but be prepared for a long, often boring one.
The chapter 10. changed the flow. It was very technical with many information known to me only in theory. I enjoyed it very much. A few typos didn't spoil its value.
The chapter 11. was very quick and easy. It was informative to the point of being a getting started document for Business Space novices. Very rudimentary material. Not sure what the purpose was since there was little to no information about developing applications with it.
The chapter 12. is more administrator-centric. Introductory for those interested in the administrative aspects of WPS/WESB.
The chapter 13.'s very light on programming and useful for monitoring and diagnosing application issues.
The appendix with tips and tricks was fine. I found many information I didn't know before.
Despite a few chapters I would not have included in the book and other, rather small deficiencies the book strives for well-thought-out presentation of application development with IBM WebSphere BPM tools and goes beyond a rudimentary material. This book goes a long way toward becoming a treasure trove of information about developing applications with IBM WebSphere Integration Developer V7 and its reading will undoubtedly help your efforts in mastering the tools at a higher level.Application Development for IBM WebSphere Process Server 7 and Enterprise Service Bus 7 OverviewThis book covers building an application using the principles of BPM and SOA, using WPS and WESB. The various detailed aspects, features, and capabilities of the product are conveyed though examples. It also provides pragmatic guidance on various aspects in relation to building the SOA application. Every section has solutions to common problems and pitfalls. This book is for SOA architects, designers, and developers who have a basic understanding of SOA concepts and would like to learn more about building solutions and applications using IBM WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus.

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Professional K2 blackpearl (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) Review

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Professional K2 blackpearl (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) ReviewThis book is a great resource for those new to Business Process Management (BPM) and for those that have had years of experience. It starts off with a primer for those that are unfamiliar with the terms and jargon of the BPM industry and quickly jumps into the usage and applicability of K2 blackpearl to address real-world BPM challenges.
Anyone looking to include or enhance workflow & BPM efforts to their new or existing projects should buy this book. Anyone working with Microsoft products and technologies --- especially SharePoint Server (MOSS), BizTalk, and notably InfoPath will find that the design, development, and deployment of workflow / BPM solutions are significantly improved. Some of the tips & tricks in the book include sections for including Line-of-Business (LOB) data from other applications like SAP, MS-CRM, and the methodology to include LOB information to create enterprise-wide workflow & BPM solutions.
The book also addresses the perennial question of Build or Buy. I think after reading this book you will know the answer. The answer makes perfects sense, but will surprise many.
I have had the privilege of working with many of these authors in my career. I'm glad to see they put their collective knowledge together in one easy to use compendium. Well done!
Professional K2 blackpearl (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) OverviewK2 blackpearl and the K2 platform is a large, powerful, "game-changing" application platform built on Microsoft technologies. Understanding it from top to bottom would be a great task for a single person, which is why we have gathered more than a dozen authors to supply you with the information to successfully transform your company into a process-oriented, efficient business that can grow with the K2 platform.
Since this is the first book on K2 blackpearl, you will find a broad range of topics in this book, from the market in which K2 blackpearl is aimed to the architecture of the platform, from how to approach process design to developing your own custom user manager.
The first part of the book is meant for everyone and provides an understanding of K2 blackpearl and where it fits in the marketplace. It is included to provide a framework for thinking about various aspects of process-driven applications, including how they differ from business process management techniques; identifying processes in your company to automate, the different pieces that make up a process; measuring the success of your efforts; and finally shifting your company's culture in the direction of process efficiency. This section may be the only section you need to read if you are sponsoring a process improvement effort in your company. If you are responsible for leading the effort, make sure to read Chapters 3 and 4.
The other parts are meant to provide details on how to effectively deploy and use K2 blackpearl and include a broad range of topics. Read what you are most interested in, but also make sure to read Chapter 8, which will give you a great foundation to start designing processes with K2 blackpearl. Chapter 14 is also recommended for everyone because it provides an overview of the available K2 Designers and how you can share projects among them.
If you are a developer, you may be tempted to flip through the book looking for code, and you will find some, but we also recommend reading much of the rest of the book to learn how the API and the K2 platform extensions fit within the overall process-driven application environment. Pay particular attention to Chapter 22 and the Appendix, which may save you hours of coding or give you a no-code solution to something that you may have thought would take hundreds of lines of code to accomplish.
If you are an administrators, focus on Parts II and IV, but also take a look at the other chapters to gain an understanding of how your users will be using K2.
K2 blackpearl is the main subject of this book, although we devote an entire chapter, Chapter 23, to the add-on product K2 connect to give you an understanding of how to bring SAP data into your processes. We also talk a bit about K2 blackpoint, particularly in the SharePoint chapters. Since K2 blackpoint is built on the K2 blackpearl foundation, many of the same concepts apply to that product as well, but we do not point out the differences between K2 blackpearl and K2 blackpoint. For that information browse to www.k2.com.
We recommend that you approach this book in parts and perhaps read or reference each part differently. If you are working on a team, each member of the team may find one part more interesting to them than the other sections; that is expected and is how we designed the book.
Part I, "Introduction to K2 blackpearl and Process-Driven Applications": The first four chapters discuss what K2 blackpearl is, how the applications you can design may or may not fit the business process management (BPM) model, how to go about identifying and designing processes, and last how to measure results and shift the culture of your company to a more process-oriented business.
Part II, "Architecture and Installation Options for K2 blackpearl": Chapters 5 and 6 will get you started. Installing the K2 blackpearl components is a necessary step before you can start designing processes, so in these two chapters you will gain an understanding of all of the pieces of the platform, the architecture, and the supporting technology, as well as ideas on how to plan out your development, QA/staging, and production environments.
Part III, "K2 blackpearl Process Planning and Design Essentials": Chapters 7 through 14 give you a ton of information about how to design, build, extend, and generally work with the main pieces of the platform. From a step-by-step tutorial on building your first process to how to share processes across the different K2 Designers, you'll learn all of what you need to really get ramped up. Pay particular attention to Chapters 8 and 11, which cover the basic things you need to know about process planning and the various concepts of process design with K2 blackpearl and then provide an in-depth view of the available forms technologies that you can use for user interaction with your processes. If you are particularly interested in SharePoint, make sure to read Chapters 12 and 13.
Part IV, "Administration of K2 blackpearl": Chapters 15 through 20 offer an administrator's view into the platform. Things like disaster recovery, logging, security, and using the K2 Workspace for notifications, reports, assigning process permissions, and recovering from errors are all key aspects of the platform that you or someone in your company will have to understand. This section gives you everything you need to know and probably more, including how to build your own user manager to plug into the K2 platform.
Part V, "Advanced K2 blackpearl Concepts and Platform Extensions": The last part includes Chapters 21 through 23, and these chapters are there to round out the discussion of the platform. You'll find information about using the Event Bus to surface outside events to the K2 server and a discussion of tailoring the platform and your processes to your particular needs by going beyond the default settings of the components that you learned about in Chapter 8. Finally you'll learn about the K2 connect platform extension, which allows data from SAP (and eventually any system for which a WCF LOB adapter is released) to be used within your processes.

There are some pieces of this book that you can sit down and read without needing a computer or access to K2 blackpearl at all, but much of this book requires you to have access to K2 blackpearl and the supporting applications as well. Whenever we talk about designing processes, we do so in the context of the K2 Designer for Visual Studio. To install this component you will need Visual Studio 2005. Support for Visual Studio 2008 may be available by the time this book is published, so look for that on www.k2.com.
For the server pieces of the platform, you will need a Windows Server 2003 environment (virtual or otherwise) and the additional components required by the K2 server.

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Essential Business Process Modeling Review

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Essential Business Process Modeling ReviewGregor Hohpe should have read past the first 100 pages. This book is good on theory, poor on practice (does that remind you of any other SOA book?).
The examples Havey provides of "non-trivial" systems in the back are, in fact, quite trivial. What's worse is that when he ventures into the territory of "advanced" features, he gets lost. For example, on p.270, he provides an eventHandlers section, but comments it out saying that it doesn't work. I was able to get it to work as written with just a minor tweak, but he slags off the vendor instead (p.284) and proposes an awkward hack for a workaround (p.277). Then, on p.308, he presents us with a piece of parallelism that depends for its success on the use of a correlationSet. This is supposed to be clever, but is, in fact, just poor programming practice. Not only that, but it doesn't work! It can't possibly, not the way it's written. He just sent it off to the publisher without testing. We're not talking about simple syntax errors here... this is a fundamental conceptual flaw in what he's proposing. Pretty basic stuff for him to be stubbing his toe on.Essential Business Process Modeling Overview
Ten years ago, groupware bundled with email and calendar applications helped track the flow of work from person to person within an organization. Workflow in today's enterprise means more monitoring and orchestrating massive systems. A new technology called Business Process Management, or BPM, helps software architects and developers design, code, run, administer, and monitor complex network-based business processes
BPM replaces those sketchy flowchart diagrams that business analysts draw on whiteboards with a precise model that uses standard graphical and XML representations, and an architecture that allows it converse with other services, systems, and users.
Sound complicated? It is. But it's downright frustrating when you have to search the Web for every little piece of information vital to the process. Essential Business Process Modeling gathers all the concepts, design, architecture, and standard specifications of BPM into one concise book, and offers hands-on examples that illustrate BPM's approach to process notation, execution, administration and monitoring.

Author Mike Havey demonstrates standard ways to code rigorous processes that are centerpieces of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), which defines how networks interact so that one can perform a service for the other. His book also shows how BPM complements enterprise application integration (EAI), a method for moving from older applications to new ones, and Enterprise Service BUS for integrating different web services, messaging, and XML technologies into a single network. BPM, he says, is to this collection of services what a conductor is to musicians in an orchestra: it coordinates their actions in the performance of a larger composition.

Essential Business Process Modeling teaches you how to develop examples of process-oriented applications using free tools that can be run on an average PC or laptop. You'll also learn about BPM design patterns and best practices, as well as some underlying theory. The best way to monitor processes within an enterprise is with BPM, and the best way to navigate BPM is with this valuable book.


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