Glossary

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Describes the properties of a transaction:

Application Programming Interface - a set of routines, protocols and tools for building software applications.

A form of communication which allows applications to operate independently, so that they need not be running or available simultaneously. A process sends a request and may or may not wait for a response. This is a 'non-blocking' form of communications.

Atoms reflect the traditional all-or-nothing view of transactions. An atomic transaction executes completely, with all participants reaching the same outcome, or not at all.

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Blocking Communications

A synchronous messaging process whereby the requestor of a service must wait until a response is received.

Business Activity Monitoring refers to the concept of real-time access to critical business performance indicators in order to improve the effectiveness of your business operations.

Business Collaboration is a special type of business process or activity that is conducted by two or more parties to achieve a commonly defined goal or outcome. Accordingly, a business collaboration is a synonym for collaborative business process. A business collaboration typically occurs across domains of control. When a business collaboration occurs between business partners, each plays one or more roles in the collaboration.

Business Process is a set of activities that are accomplished in operating business practices to achieve a business goal. A Business Process might be either an intra-organizational process or a collaborative business process conducted by two or more parties. A collaborative process can occur across domains of control.

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Business Process Activity is a unit of work conducted by one (or more parties in case of a collaborative business process) for the purpose of achieving a business objective and can be conducted with time as a constraint or business rule. Business Process Activities are intended to capture existing or planned business practices. Business process activities are included in a business process.

BPA is often used as a synonym for BPI and certainly requires integration. However, it may not include support for long-running processes or manual processes. BPA tools generally focus on automating transactions that cross multiple applications. They may not support long-running transactions that take hours, days or weeks to complete.

Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)

BPEL is a programming language that attempts to define a common workflow language to define process control flows and the interactions between those processes.

The use of technology to integrate systems in a way that enables end-to-end business process to flow across applications. This is very similar to BPM, except without the business level management capabilities. If the tool does not include a business level dashboard, process analytics, the ability to define and track business metrics across a process, impact analysis, simulation, or other management level capabilities, it's BPI tool and not a BPM tool.

The act of defining, executing, managing and evolving the practices and procedures that define how an organization makes business decisions and acts on those decisions. The process flow is determined by process logic and the applications (or processes) themselves play virtually no role in determining where the messages are sent.

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Tools that help organizations define, enable, and manage the exchange of enterprise information through the semantics of a business process view that involves employees, customers, partners, applications, databases, etc.

A Business Transaction can be defined as an interaction in the real world between an enterprise and an individual or between two applications within or outside the enterprise that brings about a consistent change in the state of a business relationship between two or more such parties. A business relationship is any distributed state held by the parties which is subject to contractual constraints agreed by those parties. Business transactions require the execution of multiple operations. If a business transaction completes successfully then each participant will have made state changes which, in aggregate, reflect the desired outcome of the multi-party interaction.

Business transaction management is an evolution of distributed transaction management: it uses the well-established two-phase outcome protocol to coordinate application or business services, rather than data-level resource managers.

Business Transaction Management (BTM) software steps beyond the limitations of EAI and business process management software, enabling the reliable execution of transactions across application systems both within and beyond the firewall. Whether using legacy systems or vendor applications, BTM software enables all services (including Web Services and J2EE services) to participate in the transaction with a coordinated, consistent outcome. It provides assured delivery/processing and full failure recovery.

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Choreography

The pattern of interaction, expressed as a pattern of types of messages, between requestors and providers (or a set thereof).

or

The (potentially automated) design, execution, and monitoring of a sequenced set of information exchanges (Activities or Activity Sets) among a set of participants. A Choreography is frequently in support of a Collaboration. May also include:

1. The ability to specify complex sequencing of the use of a web service’s operations,
2. A description of the temporal and/or logical dependencies among Activities,
3. The necessary states that give rise to the particular message patterns, or
4. Within the context of a business transaction the description of the ordering and transitions between business transactions or sub collaborations within a binary collaboration.

Choreography, in this context, can also include process and security controls, for example.

A cohesion is a type of business transaction in which the business rules determine which elements of the transactional work must succeed for the transaction to be successfully completed.

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Data Level Integration

A form of EAI that integrates different data stores to allow the sharing of information among applications. It requires the loading of data directly into the database via its native interface and does not involve the changing of business logic.

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EAI

Enterprise Application Integration is a set of technologies that allows the movement and exchange of information between different applications and business processes within and between organizations.

The act of adjusting and repairing transactions that were unable to be completed. Without automation, organizations find that exceptions processing is one of the more costly and time-consuming efforts within their business.

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Guaranteed Delivery & Processing (GDP)

Guaranteed Delivery & Processing ensures that your message not only reaches the incoming message port but that it is correctly processed by the destination business application and that a whole sequence of related messages between business applications are processed correctly.

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GRID

Grid computing enables the virtualization of distributed computing and data resources such as processing, network bandwidth and storage capacity to create a single system image, granting users and applications seamless access to vast IT capabilities. Just as an Internet user views a unified instance of content via the Web, a grid user essentially sees a single, large virtual computer.

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Heterogeneity

A typical enterprise information system today includes many types of computer technology, from PCs to mainframes. These include a wide variety of different operating systems, application software and in-house developed applications. EAI solves the complex problem of making a heterogeneous infrastructure more coherent.

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. It is a generic, stateless, protocol which can be used for many tasks beyond its use for hypertext, such as name servers and distributed object management systems, through extension of its request methods, error codes and headers. A feature of HTTP is the typing and negotiation of data representation, allowing systems to be built independently of the data being transferred.

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Linux

Linux is a free Unix-type operating system originally created by Linus Torvalds with the assistance of developers around the world. Developed under the GNU General Public License, the source code for Linux is freely available to everyone.

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MAK (Mutual Acknowledgement or Mutually Assured Common Knowledge)

Mutual Acknowledgement or Mutually Assured Common Knowledge is defined as the inherent ability to ensure that a business or transaction dialogue is completed to the confirmed satisfaction of, and notification to, all parties involved in that transaction.

Message-Oriented Middleware is a set of products that connects applications running on different systems by sending and receiving application data as messages. Examples are RPC, CPI-C and message queuing.

A form of communication between programs, application data is combined with a header (information about the data) to form a message. Messages are stored in queues, which can be buffered or persistent. It's communication is asynchronous and provides a loosely-coupled message exchange mechanism between heterogeneous computer systems.

Software that facilitates the communication between two applications. It provides an API through which applications invoke services and it controls the transmission of the data exchange over the network. There are three basic types: communications middleware, database middleware and systems middleware.

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Non-Blocking Communications

An asynchronous messaging process whereby the requestor of a service does not have to wait until a response is received from another application.

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SOAP

SOAP is a standard protocol for the exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed environment. It is an XML based protocol that consists of three parts: an envelope that defines a framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it, a set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined datatypes, and a convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses. SOAP can potentially be used in combination with a variety of other protocols such as HTTP.

The goal of STP is the achievement of completion of an item of work through its entire life cycle without manual intervention.

Supply Chain Management (SCM) is that set of skills and disciplines, including those of IT, which shepherd a product from its original design to its ultimate delivery to the buyer.

A form of communication that requires applications to run concurrently. A process issues a call and waits until it receives a response.

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Transaction

A transaction is a set of operations on shared resources - databases, queues, files, messages, shared objects - that appear to the user as one indivisible activity.

A mechanism to synchronize updates on different machines or platforms so that they all fail or all succeed together. Each party is first asked if it prepared to commit the changes, and if all are so prepared, the decision to commit is made and each party is instructed to apply it. The decision to commit is thus centralized, but each participant has the right to veto. This is a key process in real time transaction-based environments.

The same pattern as two-phase commit (q.v.) - first extracting promises to perform some action from several parties, then informing them whether they are to finally perform that action or not - but renamed to avoid implications that particular implementation techniques are required. Two-phase outcome concentrates on the inter-party messages and their effect on the relationship between the parties, which may be reflected internally in the parties in various ways. Two-phase commit is sometimes assumed to mean locking strategies are required, although this is not essential.

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Web Services

A Web Service is an application accessible using standard Internet protocols. Web Services are accessed over Web protocols such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and data formats such as Extensible Markup Language (XML). A Web Service interface is defined strictly in terms of the messages the Web Service accepts and generates in response.
A web service is made up of the following:

1. A message format that is common and extensible
2. A service description language that is common and extensible
3. A method of being able to be discovered

WSDL provides a model and an XML format for describing Web services. WSDL enables one to separate the description of the abstract functionality offered by a service from concrete details of a service description such as "how" and "where" that functionality is offered.

WSO provides the ability to model an application from component parts, by modeling the flow of control across the components. The goal of WSO is to enable fast and flexible application development by combining new components with existing ones.

The method or process that an organization uses to process a work item. Through the analysis of workflow, processes can be streamlined and, in many cases, automated.

The technology used to automate the processing of work items from initiation to resolution. Applications are seen to have a high return-on-investment (ROI) because they reduce manual efforts, thereby increasing productivity and efficiency.

If your processes are manual to a significant extent, your process management solution needs to include workflow automation capabilities. These capabilities include but are not limited to workflow balancing that automatically routes tasks to people based on their role and length of their work queue, and a robust interface for managers and employees to manage assignments beyond just an e-mail message.