Ksenia (Ryndina) Wahler, Jochen Kuester and Aurelien Monot have released on AlphaWorks an experimental Eclipse plugin dubbed "Object Lifecycle Explorer" for IBM WebSphere Business Modeler (for which a trial version is available [1]). Object Life Cycle Explorer for WebSphere Business Modeler implements several techniques for the integration of process and object life cycle modeling developed at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory.
The concept of Object Lifecycle (a.k.a State Machine) is emerging both in terms of methodology and programming concept. For instance the Praxeme Enterprise Methodology relies heavily on this concept, while both IBM Process Server and Microsoft's Workflow Foundation offer a state machine formalism that can be transformed into orchestrations.
Ksenia notes:
As part of achieving a business goal, a business process typically manipulates several business objects, transforming their states as the process progresses.
Understanding the complete state evolution of a single business object is often required for monitoring, governance, and compliance purposes, but eliciting such object life cycle information correctly from complex process models can be challenging.
She and her colleagues developed the Object Lifecycle Explorer based on the IBM Business State Machine metamodel to:
- enable modeling and visualization
- extract object lifecycle from business process models
- check the consistency of process models against the object lifecycles to detect non-conformant state changes
- generate a process model from an object lifecycle
In particular they establish a deterministic relationship between object lifecycles and business processes:
The object life cycle extraction is then performed by applying transformation rules, which map activities in process models to state transitions in object life cycles and identify initial and final states for each life cycle.
In this paper published last year, Jochen Kuester and his colleagues report:
Our experiments with IAA [IBM Insurance Application Architecture] have shown the viability of the approach for sizeable reference models. Overall, our solution can be seen as a contribution to bridging the gap between process and object modeling.
The state machine formalism is still new to most developers and generally not used. Today, all states and transitions - intrinsic to a business object- are somehow hard-coded using ad hoc formalisms or no formalism at all. In particular, there is no attempt to link the actions of a controller with the states of a model in a formal way when using the Model-View-Controller pattern. We can expect that tools such as the Object Lifecycle Explorer will help relay both the importance and simplicity of this formalism.
[1] The plug-in installs readily in WBM trial's version and comes with a full tutorial.