Processes, Orchestrations, Services, and other confusing terminology

Introduction

There are a number of different terms used in Adobe LiveCycle Process Management, including process, orchestration, workflow, service, and component. These can be confusing.

Part of the reason for the proliferation of terminology is the history of the Process Management product and industry trends, and this blog entry tries to provide this perspective. This is my understanding of how these terms fit together, and should not be regarded as a definitive explanation.

If you don’t care about the historical perspective, skip to the end for a summary.

Workflow

The first version of Process Management was called “Adobe Workflow”. And the things you created were called “Workflows”. Even today, many people will generically refer to any combination of boxes and lines that you create in Workbench as a “workflow”.

However, the term workflow was used primarily in the 80’s and 90’s to refer to more traditional image storing and routing applications, and doesn’t really adequately describe the much more useful data-oriented and integration capabilities of LiveCycle. In the 2000’s, the terms BPM or Business Process Management started to become more widely used, not just as a technology, but also as a way of thinking about and improving your business. Various BPM disciplines evolved, including Six Sigma, Lean, and others. LiveCycle fits in much more closely with BPM than it does with the older imaging-oriented workflow systems, so…

Adobe Workflow became LiveCycle Process Management, and Workflow was replaced with …

Process

A Process is no different to a workflow, really, it’s just a term that better reflects the data-orientation and integration capabilities of the LiveCycle platform.

In LiveCycle, a process is almost always associated with a Form, and a series of human interactions that allow people to interact with the form and its data. There are almost always integration steps as well, such as pre-filling the form, writing to a database, adding a digital signature, sending emails, etc. These are also known as “long lived processes”, because they involve people interating with the form over a period of days or weeks.

Long lived process have a unique process-id, have every step recorded and audited, can be re-tried if any step fails, and can be viewed and managed through the Adminui interface.

Orchestration

In LiveCycle ES, we started seeing an increasing number of processes that are short-lived, and don’t include human steps. An example is the Default Render Process in LiveCycle ES. These processes used to be written as Java code in LiveCycle 7 – in ES, they have the advantage that being processes, we end-users can see and modify them very easily. It’s really just visual drag-and-drop programming. You can also easily build your own orchestrations to do something useful – for example, you may want to grab some data from an XML file, populate a form with it, encrypt the form with a password, and email the result to someone. There are no human steps in that, just a series of operation that need to be performed as quickly as possible. You could do this using the API’s, but implementing this as an orchration is quicker, more reliable, and much easier to change.

These short-lived or “straight-thru” processes do not store an audit trail, run as fast as possible (very close to native Java speeds), and do not have a unique process-id that identifies them. They cannot be managed through Adminui, and if they fail, they simply throw an exception back to the caller, rather than being able to be re-tried thru Adminui.

Someone coined the term “Orchestration” to refer to this type of process, and the name has stuck. I’m not sure where the use of this term originated, but it’s used in several other standards BPM standards and products.

Notes:

• Adobe do not officially use this term in their documentation (see http://blogs.adobe.com/livecycledocs/2009/02/the_livecycle_terminology_secr.html) but I think it’s a helpful term that differentiates a process as being short-lived.
• You can still use a long-lived process for something that doesn’t involve humans. We often use long-lived-processes for processes that geneally run very quickly, because of the advantages of having each step audited, and for the ability to re-try a step if anything goes wrong. I would still call this an orchestration, because it doesn’t involve any human steps.

Here is a screenshot from WorkBench. This shows a process, its implementation, and its properties. This is a short-lived process, so I would call it an orchestration.

Component

A LiveCycle Component is basically a bunch of Java code, packaged up into a jar file, and deployed into the LiveCycle server.

LiveCycle Components are brilliant. I love ‘em. They are my insurance policy. I know that there is no problem that I can’t solve in the process world, because if i get stuck, I can write Java code to implement it. Then I can turn it into a LiveCycle component, drop it into LiveCycle, and bingo, I can use it my processes. And the real beauty of it is that anyone else can use my component too, without needing to understand programming. In LiveCycle, Adobe have created the best implementation of a server-side component model that I’ve ever seen – it’s a bit like those Visual Basic ocx controls that you can buy to build your GUI – but on the server.

The concept of LiveCycle server-side components came from a predecessor of Process Management, and were originally called QPACs – Quick (QLink for the real old-timers) Process Action Components.

Each component defines one or more services (see below). Although in reality, most components only define a single service, so components and services are somewhat interchangable.

A service can define one or more operations. An operation is the thing that actually does the work – like sending an email, encrypting a PDF, or writing a file to disk. Services group common operations together – so the File Utilities component contains a FileUtilsService, which in turn contains operations to read, write, create and delete files. Operations each define a number of input and output parameters.

For Java programmers:

• Component == .jar file
• Service == Class
• Operation == method

Here is a screenshot of a Component within LiveCycle.

Avoka has been building components to solve real business problems with LiveCycle for many years, and we turn most of our components into re-usable components that anyone can use. We have a large library of components that solve most of the problems we’ve encountered over the last 5 years. So most of the time, you don’t even have to learn how to build components – if it’s not already in the Adobe “box”, then check out our website – there’s a good chance we may already have built it for you.

For more information, see: http://www.avoka.com/avoka/escomponents.shtml, or email info@avoka.com

Service

Another concept that was introduced in LiveCycle ES was that of a “Service Bus” or “Service Oriented Architecture”. LiveCycle is internally implemented as a service bus. In simple terms, any bit of functionality within the LiveCycle server can be exposed to the outside world as a “Service”, and can be invoked in a number of different and useful ways. Once you’ve defined a service, you can define one or more EndPoints for that service. So for example, I might have a service that encrypts a PDF – I could add a Web Service Endpoint that allows me to invoke that service using Web Services. And I could also add a Watch Folder endpoint that allows me to invoke that service by dropping a file into a folder.

Now things get a little confusing. Services can be implemented as either some Java code, or as a LiveCycle process.

• If you need to write Java code, you create a component, deploy that, and you get a service.
• Or you can do it by creating an orchestration (or process), you define your orchestration, activate it, and you get a service.
• Either way, you get a service. The choice of whether to use an orchestration or Java code depends on the complexity of the service you’re trying to create, and whether it can be created by joining together (or orchestrating) a number of other existing services.

The LiveCycle process engine doesn’t really care whether your service is implemented in Java or as an orchestration, you invoke and manipulate it in exactly the same way. You can either call a service externally (by defining an endpoint), or you can invoke one service from another, simply by dragging the service into process. This is a very neat way to handle things – why should you care how something is implemented, you should be able to use it the same way.

Note: An orchestration only ever defines a single operation, always called “invoke”. Whereas a component can define multiple operations.

This screenshot shows two services, one implemented as a component, and the other as an orchestration.

Summary

• Process: Something that you build in Workbench, and looks like a flowchart. Can be user-oriented/long-lived, or straight-thru/short-lived.
• Orchestration: An unofficial but commonly-used term for a straight-thru/short-lived process.
• Workflow: An older term for a process.
• Component: A jar file containing some code to do something “useful”, that you deploy to the LiveCycle server. A component contains services, which in turn contain operations. All the Adobe services are built as components, as are all the Avoka add-on services.
• Service: Something that lives in the LiveCycle server that provides some sort of “service”. Can be implemented either as Java code (as a component) or as a process/orchestration.