bxModeller in brief

It is an open source web-based application tool, designed and developed by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.a in collaboration with eBMS-ISUFI, University of Salento , to support a business user in the modelling of the Business Processes. A Business Process is a collection of linked activities to achieve a determined enterprise objective in the planning phase.

bxModeller stands for bpmn-xpdl Modeller. The graphical notation used is Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN), an OMG standard for processes modelling. Moreover, the tool allows to traduce Business Process Diagram in a business process execution language (XML Process Description Language), which can be understood by a workflow engine.

In the last years, the trend of designers and developers focuses on Web Applications development, because of their growing answer rate, realtime performances and user experience close to stand-alone ones thanks to the use of RIA (Rich Internet Applications) technologies. They can be exploited to create collaborative tools in order to update changes made by any participant.

As modern informatics technologies allow it, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.a has developed a collaborative framework that can effectively work in real-time, i.e. when a user wants to modify a document, this change can be seen by all collaborators of the project. This ensures a real collaboration experience because it looks like all the participants are physically sitting around a table to model a project on a common white sheet. Obviously in order to make this experience more real, it is possible to make, beyond simple video sharing also audio sharing, for example by phone, to coordinate modifications quickly.

bxModeller Architecture

Nowadays, internet development has enabled the enterprises to collaborate, removing the limit of physical distances. It is important, to take advantage of potentialities of ICT, trying to realize collaborative informatics tools, which give added value to enterprise in the planning and modelling of its business processes. For this reason, it is possible to consider innovative the approach that enables to share processes intra(or inter)-enterprise with partners, during the process modelling phase. Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.a has proposed a web-based application which offers the possibility to model business processes in a collaborative way, through BPMN, and then represent them in XPDL for being able to execute them in a workflow engine. The bxModeller tool has been designed as a web-based application so that it can be used from some connected computer to Internet. Therefore, it is not necessary to install any type of software to transfer from computer to another computer. This makes our tool much less invasive then stand-alone one.

The bxModeller has been designed by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.a in the following tier’s layers:

• Presentation-tier
• Web-tier
• Application-tier
• Data tier

The presentation-tier produces the web pages in html format, this is the first level of the architecture and it is a container of the whole tool, the end user will use the GUI here defined and wropped.

The web-tier is made by an Ajax engine, implemented through Direct Web Remoting (DWR) library, it allows a good level of interaction with Java on the server side. This layer includes the potentiality of the Ajax core that supports the main interactivity aspects inside the application. The Architectural idea behind this choice finds support on the best performaces obtained by a lower mass of data exchanged with the server side. The result is a web-based application that works like a stand alone one.

The application-tier corresponding to an integrated module(s) in an application server for generation of dynamic contents. The technology used at this layer is Java on Apache Tomcat, this layer manages the Java core developed for the application according with the DWR library used at web tier level.

The data-tier include the Local Knowledge Base, which will have the function to contain all processes modelled by bxModeller and saved in a XPDL representation. The KLB represents a collection of processes, a richness for the firms able to maximize the politic of reuse value, it means that the user of the application can recycle parts of the previous modelling reducing part of the design and modelling time needed.