A Lightweight Process Mashup Approach Based on Business Unit

Traditional business process orchestration methods (e.g., service composition and workflow) are usually based on server-side middleware techniques and performed in a rigid development process that requires professional skills. As an emerging technology, mash up helps to move Web 2.0 into enterprises and leverage SOA investments, enabling end-users to draw upon contents, presentation or functionality logic from separated Web sources to create innovative applications. In this paper, we propose a lightweight process mash up approach. The fundamental principle of our approach is encapsulating business activities as browser-side components, and orchestrating them based on the event-driven Publish/Subscribe communication paradigm. The component model is named BU (Business Unit), representing basic blocks in business process mashups. Based on BU, the approach leverages the concept of composite event to define complex process behavior on browser side, and consequently hides classic process constructs like conditional branching and looping, allowing end-users to create articulated business processes in a lightweight fashion.