DESIGN PATTERNS FOR INTEGRATING ENTERPRISE APPLICATION WITH ANY BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Abstract

Most of existing Business Process Management (BPM) technologies have their own designer tools. The designer tool is easy to use to design and create graphical user interface (GUI) to work with their own BPM. However, designer tools usually do not support advance GUI execution. Thus, users working in different environment but involved in business processes are more likely to work with a different set of advance GUI. In order to maintain such interoperable capability on heterogeneous environments or platforms, developers have to build a specific set of GUI for enterprise applications which are suitable for each business process. This is accomplished by using BPM API to create communication between enterprise applications and BPM. However, different BPM vendors have different APIs integrated into the system. If the developers need to change BPM vendor for existing resources compatibility, they have to rewrite code to interact with new set of APIs every time. Thus, a framework that is easy to plug enterprise applications to connect with any BPM systems and reusable is necessary. In this thesis, a new framework applying Design pattern principles is studies for creating reusable software efficiently. This framework employs six types of Design pattern which are Bridge pattern, Decorator pattern, Factory pattern, Singleton pattern, Façade pattern, and General-Hierarchy pattern. The objectives are reusability, flexibility, and maintainability of GUI that can easily support any BPM vendors. The framework is demonstrated and implemented by applying Design patterns on Oracle BPM and Bonita BPM. Evaluation is done through coupling of the new code obtained from the application of the above Design patterns. Results of the evaluation present modules coupling such as Stamp coupling, Control coupling, and Routine coupling are reduced by apply above Design patterns.