MBC - Mobile Business Collaboration Bruno Filipe RamˆoaLima Dissertac¸ao˜ para obtenc¸ao˜ do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia de Redes de Comunica¸c˜oes J ´uri Presidente: Prof. Paulo Jorge Pires Ferreira Orientador: Prof. Lu´ıs Manuel Antunes Veiga Vogais: Prof. Joao˜ Dias Pereira Eng. Paulo Chainho Novembro 2011 Acknowledgements I owe my deepest gratitude to my teacher advisor, Prof. Lu´ıs Veiga, who has the attitude and the substance of a genius: He continuously gave me support and guidance throughout the research and during the writing of this document. Without his guidance and persistent help this dissertation would not have been possible. I also would like to thank Eng. Paulo Chainho, my advisor from PT Inovac¸ao,˜ for his tips and advices, during the design and development of this work. I share the credit of my work with my colleagues from PT Inovac¸ao˜ and IST. Their help during my learning of the technologies and the development phase of this work was invalu- able. I wish to thank my friends and family because without their friendship and patience, it would be impossible to carry out this work. However, my special thanks go for my parents, Antonio´ and Teresa. Their love and affection inspired me during my darkest and uninspired days. Finally, I also would like to thank my girlfriend, Mariana Daniel. She gave me motivation and strength to complete this work successfully. Lisboa, November 18, 2011 Bruno Ramoaˆ Lima Dedication This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Antonio´ Jose´ de Oliveira Lima and Teresa Ferreira Ramoaˆ Lima, who have given me the opportunity of an education from the best institutions and support throughout my life. They taught me that the best kind of knowledge to have is that which is learned for its own sake and that even the largest task can be accomplished if it is done one step at a time. ”Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.” - Thomas Jefferson Resumo A mobilidade inerente dos dispositivos moveis´ esta´ substituindo os ambientes de trabalho fixo, tornando este tipo de dispositivos uma especie´ de bem indispensavel,´ tanto a n´ıvel pessoal como profissional. A ascensao˜ da Web 2.0 permite aos utilizadores interagirem e colaborarem, usando, por exemplo, aplicac¸oes˜ web em dispositivos moveis.´ Hoje em dia, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) e´ o paradigma mais adotado para o desen- volvimento de aplicac¸oes˜ distribu´ıdas, aumentando a interoperabilidade entre sistemas het- erogeneos.´ A tecnologia dos web services tornou-se a abordagem preferida para implementar soluc¸oes˜ baseadas no paradigma SOA. A gestao˜ de negocios´ orientada aos processos tem como objetivos a concec¸ao˜ e controlo de estruturas organizacionais de forma flex´ıvel. Assim, estas organizac¸oes˜ podem rapidamente adaptar-se as` mudanc¸as estruturais e operacionais. Os sistemas de BPM (Business Process Man- agement) fazem a ponte entre os analistas de negocio´ e os desenvolvedores de software. Este documento descreve uma plataforma de colaborac¸ao˜ que permite a modelac¸ao˜ e execuc¸ao˜ de tarefas espec´ıficas de um dom´ınio, usando processos de negocio.´ A activac¸ao˜ e actualizac¸ao˜ destes processos de negocio´ pode ser feita pelos utilizadores, usando uma aplicac¸ao˜ cliente independente do terminal usado (TV, Smartphone, Laptop, Tablet), ou por um sistema externo, usando a tecnologia dos web services. O projecto MBC visa a integrac¸ao˜ da soluc¸ao˜ proposta com a plataforma de colaborac¸ao˜ desenvolvida pela PT Inovac¸ao,˜ chamada PUC. Abstract The inherent mobility of mobility devices is replacing the fixed work environments, making such devices a kind of indispensable good, both personally and professionally. The rise of Web 2.0 allows user interaction and collaboration, employing, for instance, web applications in mobile devices. Today, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is the most widely adopted paradigm for de- velopment of distributed applications, increasing the interoperability between heterogeneous systems. The web services technology has become the preferred approach to implement solu- tions based on SOA paradigm. Process-oriented business management aims to design and control the organizational structures in a very flexible way. Thus, these organizations can rapidly adapt to changing conditions of the organization’s structure and operation. The BPM (Business Process Manage- ment) systems make the bridge between business analysts and the software developers. This document describes a platform which allows the modeling and execution of specific tasks of a domain, using business processes. The activation and update of these business pro- cesses can be performed by users, using a client application independent of the used terminal (TV, Smartphone, Laptop, Tablet), or by external systems, using the web services technology. The MBC project aims the integration of proposed solution with the collaborative platform developed by PT Inova¸c˜ao, called PUC. Palavras Chave Keywords Palavras Chave AOS (Arquitectura Orientada a Servic¸os) Aplicac¸ao˜ Web Colaborac¸ao˜ Fluxo de Trabalho Interoperabilidade Servic¸os Web Processos de Negocio´ Keywords Business Process Collaboration Interoperability SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Web Application Web Services Workflow Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Background and Motivation...............................1 1.2 Objectives and Contributions..............................3 1.3 Document Structure...................................4 2 State of the Art5 2.1 Web Applications.....................................5 2.2 Business Processes....................................9 2.3 Enterprise Integration.................................. 16 2.3.1 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)...................... 17 2.3.2 Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)................... 17 2.3.3 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).......................... 18 2.3.4 Discussion..................................... 21 2.3.5 ESB Solutions................................... 22 2.4 Summary.......................................... 27 3 Solution’s Architecture 29 3.1 PUC’s Architecture.................................... 31 3.2 KR’s Architecture..................................... 33 3.3 ESB’s Architecture.................................... 33 3.4 MBC’s Architecture.................................... 35 i 3.4.1 Presentation Layer................................ 36 3.4.2 Service Layer................................... 36 3.4.3 Business Layer.................................. 37 3.4.4 Domain Layer................................... 41 3.4.5 Notifier....................................... 42 3.5 Prototypical Examples.................................. 42 3.6 Summary.......................................... 44 4 Solution’s Implementation 45 4.1 Used Technologies.................................... 46 4.1.1 Drools....................................... 46 4.1.2 Java EE and JBoss AS............................... 47 4.1.3 EJB......................................... 47 4.1.4 Gson........................................ 49 4.1.5 GWT........................................ 50 4.1.6 Hibernate..................................... 50 4.1.7 MVEL....................................... 51 4.2 MBC Platform....................................... 51 4.2.1 Web Application Module............................ 51 4.2.2 Core Module................................... 55 4.2.3 Notifier Module.................................. 60 4.3 Summary.......................................... 61 5 Evaluation 63 5.1 Testing Environment................................... 63 5.2 Qualitative Evaluation.................................. 65 ii 5.3 Quantitative Evaluation................................. 66 5.4 Summary.......................................... 73 6 Conclusions 75 6.1 Review........................................... 75 6.2 Functionalities....................................... 76 6.3 Future Work........................................ 76 A Appendices 81 A.1 Screenshots of the Web Browsers............................ 81 A.2 Screenshots of a Smartphone Device.......................... 83 iii iv List of Figures 2.1 Classic and AJAX model for web applications.....................6 2.2 Example of a message formatted using JSON.....................7 2.3 Modeling of a business process using BPMN..................... 12 2.4 SOA’s Architecture.................................... 20 3.1 Architecture Overview.................................. 29 3.2 PUC’s Architecture.................................... 32 3.3 Knowledge Repository’s Architecture......................... 34 3.4 Communication process using the ESB......................... 34 3.5 ESB’s Architecture.................................... 35 3.6 MBC’s Architecture.................................... 36 3.7 Client Component’s Architecture............................ 36 3.8 Internal structure of a business process......................... 38 3.9 Execution flow of a work item.............................. 40 3.10 Execution flow of a business process.......................... 41 4.1 Life cycle of a EJB..................................... 48 4.2 Web Application’s Structure............................... 52 4.3 Web Client’s Structure.................................. 53 4.4 Reply from the Sign-in Service .............................. 54 4.5 Java code to parse the reply from the Sign-in Service ................. 54 v 4.6 Java code to serialize and deserialize Java objects................... 55 4.7