In the above example, the partner is the web service that
has the ability to process the client's request. The customer sends the guest itinerary
for processing. The BPEL process receives the itinerary, invokes a web service that
processes the itinerary, and returns the itinerary back to the customer. This simple
process helps us understand the BPEL activities that we will focus on later in this book.
Enterprise Application Development
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Refer to Chapter 10 to learn how partner services can be designed and created
using NetBeans.
Activities
Activities are the individual business tasks within the process that compose the
larger business goal. In the previous screenshot, activities represent each step in the
process. Thus the most common activities are Receive, Invoke, Assign, and Reply.
For more information on the BPEL activities supported in the BPEL Designer, refer
to Chapter 5.
Variables
In the previous example, between the Receive and the Invoke activity, we are
assigning the guest itinerary elements to a new variable. (Assigning Guest name,
travel date, preferred class.) This is basically a copying process (creates an XPath
expression in the BPEL file) and it can be done visually using the NetBeans BPEL
Mapper (explained in Chapter 5). Variables store the data that are used by the
business process.
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