As a process moves from activity to activity, it consumes time, and each activity adds to the overall duration. But different sorts of activities have different durations, and it’s not uncommon to observe a ten-step process that outpaces, say, a five-step one. It depends, of course, on what those activities are doing.
In SOA, process cycle times range from one second or less to one or more years! The latter sort need not have a large number of activities. The pyramids might have been built rock-by-rock over several decades, but protracted SOA processes typically span only a few dozen tasks, a handful of which consume almost the entire interval.
As we discuss in this article, most of that time is spent waiting. The disputes process often requires several months to complete, because at various times it sits idle waiting for information from the customer, the merchant, or the back office. Business processes crawl along at human speed, it often makes sense to let SOA manage the end-to-end flow.
It’s not easy to build an SOA process engine that can simultaneously blaze through a sub-second process but keep on top of a one that hasn’t moved in weeks. On the other hand, when a long-running process rouses, we expect the engine to race very quickly to the next milestone. The central argument of this article is that both long-running and short-running processes run in very quick bursts, but whereas a short-running process runs in a single burst, a long-running process might have several bursts, separated by long waits. To support long-running processes, the process engine needs a strategy to keep state.
In this article, we examine the fundamental differences between long-running and short-running processes. We discuss how to model state, and demonstrate how to build a long-running process as a combination of several short-running processes tied together by state. We also show how to compile short-running BPEL processes to improve the execution speed of a burst.
SOA processes have the following types of activities:
The first three sorts of activities execute quickly, the first two in the order of milliseconds, the third often sub-second but seldom more than a few seconds (in the case of a synchronous call to a slow system). These activities are active: as the process navigates through them, it actively performs work, and in doing so ties up the process engine. Event times are generally much longer and more variable. Events come from other systems, so (with the exception of timed events) the process cannot control how quickly they arrive. The process passively waits for events, in effect going to sleep until they come.
An event can occur at the beginning of a process—indeed, every SOA process starts with an event—or in the middle. An event in the middle is called an intermediate event. The segment of a process between two events is called a burst. In the following figure, events are drawn as circles, activities as boxes, and bursts as bounding boxes that contain activities. Process (a), for example, starts with an event and is followed by two activities—Set Data and Sync Call—which together form a burst. Process (b) starts with an event, continues with a burst (consisting of the activities Set Data and Call System Async), proceeds to an intermediate event (Fast Response), and concludes with a burst containing the activity Sync Call. Process (c) has two intermediate events and three bursts, and (d) has a single intermediate event and two bursts.
Processes are classified by duration as follows:
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