A business process or workflow is a coordinated chain of activities intended to produce a business result. Total automation of business processes is practically unachievable without considering human interaction. In some processes, human workflow is a major emphasis. In others, human participation is only required on an exception basis.
Workflow SE is a JBI based engine, which provides task management and human intervention in a business process.Workflow SE uses a simple task definition language to define the tasks related functionality like task assignment to user/groups, escalation, timeout etc.
Why a separate Workflow SE?
Following are some of the reasons:
BPEL does not provide human interaction.
Extending BPEL with new custom extension is cumbersome and makes BPEL complex, non portable.
Clear separation of human interaction/task related functionality into a separate component.
Uses user security subject propagation through JavaEE SE for showing user specific task list.
Support for recovery and reliability. (almost)
BPEL and Workflow Interaction
Following diagram illustrates a typical interaction between various open jbi components.
This also shows how a BPEL business process can invoke a web service operation implemented by Workflow SE for task management.