After my previous quick introduction to TIBCO iProcess Suite, I will take this opportunity to go through the main parts of the core component of iProcess, its Server.
Looking in more detail at the iProcess Server’s architecture we can see that its engines are organized into nodes, where a node is formed by 1 or N iProcess Engine servers sharing a database instance. If there is more than one engine for load balancing or fault tolerance, it’s called a node cluster. Engines use Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) to communicate with the clients and can be split into four parts:
- Process Sentinels: which are responsible for making sure that the rest of the processes are running.
- Foreground Processes: processes dealing with user interaction.
- Background Processes: processes performing the “internal” tasks.
- MBox Set: communication link between background and foreground processes
The Server comes with a client interface called Objects Server which provides an API to interact with the engine. It is available in two “flavors”:
- Process Objects (TPO): a thick client implementation API for COM/C++/Java.
- Server Objects (TSO): a thin client implementation API for EJB and .NET.
Using this APIs we can develop custom web-clients, web-services or integrate our J2EE or .NET applications with iProcess.
Business Processes executed by the iProcess Server can interact with external systems as well using EAI plugins. There are plug-ins for different systems, including BusinessWorks, Oracle, Java, SQL Server and scripts.
IProcess Server Architecture
on Jul 29th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Hi Haritza
Thanks for your article. I’ve been trying to understand the internals of iPE, and this does assist somewhat.
Please take a look at the comment that I left at http://nareshallusden.blogspot.com/2008/05/tibco-iprocess.html
I’d be keen to hear your perspective.
Thanks!
(On a side note, could you consider adding the wordpress plugin that enables me to receive email updates when comments are left - on a post I’ve commented on naturally…? ta.)
on Jul 29th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Thanks a lot for you comment Paul!
Looking at you comment on the blog you mention there might be two reasons for the differences. First is that the iProcess version that is mentioned there is different to iProcess 11 which is the one I have talked about here. As you probably know, since TIBCO bought Staffware, there have been lots of changes in the application to adapt and update it. The second is that I have only mentioned the components that I have considered most important which may have left some out of the picture.
Regarding, the wordpress plugin, thanks for the suggestion, we will look into it.