Understanding Business Process Objects

The mmBusinessProcess class allows you to create business process objects that form the foundation of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Service-oriented architecture presents software applications as high-level capabilities that can be consumed as services. This is in constrast to the fine-grained capabilities presented by business objects.

The following diagram shows the basic architecture of the business process object. Notice the business process object can have one or more associated business objects each with their own business rule object. In addition, the business process object can have its own rule object for enforcing rules at the business process level.

This architecture provides the following benefits:

You can create objects that can be mapped to real-world business processes understood by business people (non-IT)
It drives the solution development process from a higher level that is more closely bound to the business process being automated
Service abstraction allows different implementations to be substituted
It promotes agile business processes that can easily change as needed