System and method for integrating disparate data and application sources using a web services orchestration platform with business process execution language (BPEL)

1 . A system for implementing a business process to integrate data, comprising:

a web services orchestration platform having a flow canvas for a user to create a graphical representation of a business process execution language (BPEL) business process accessing at least one data source, said web services orchestration platform generating a corresponding BPEL document; and

an application server adapted to receive a BPEL document from said web services orchestration platform, said application server having a run time environment (RTE) for executing a BPEL process on desired data sources for a received BPEL document.

2 . The system of claim 1 , wherein said server includes a repository for receiving said BPEL document.

3 . The system of claim 1 , wherein said server has a Java 2 platform enterprise edition (J2EE) environment.

4 . The system of claim 1 , wherein said BPEL document is communicated from said web orchestration platform to said server via a hypertext transfer protocol simple object access protocol (HTTP/SOAP) interface.

5 . The system of claim 1 , wherein said at least one data source includes at least one of a streaming data source, a web site, a database, and a network document.

6 . The system of claim 1 , further comprising a web services import tool for importing web services.

7 . The system of claim 1 , further comprising a teach time environment for a user to define a navigation path and target pattern for extracting information from an electronic document.

8 . The system of claim 1 , further comprising: a real time data server adapted to access a data stream and publish real time data to subscribers, whereby said at least one data source may comprise real time data.

9 . The system of claim 1 , wherein said RTE comprises an execution engine including:

a web services gateway;

a parser for parsing a BPEL document to create a document object model (DOM);

a compiler that creates an executable object model (EOM) of a business process from said DOM;

a processor for executing EOMs as virtual machine processes; and

a service invocation bus for binding an activity to a web service provider or data transporter.

10 . The system of claim 9 , wherein said service invocation bus comprises:

a service invocation bus request queue;

a dispatcher thread pool;

a web services invocation foundation (WSIF) API; and

at least one provider interface.

11 . The system of claim 10 , wherein said service invocation bus includes:

a first provider interface for .NET™ web services; and

a second provider interface for Java services to access at least one of a real time data stream, a navigation and extraction, and a database.

12 . The system of claim 1 , further comprising a real time data server comprising:

a process engine;

a publisher interface;

a subscriber interface;

a Java messaging service;

a persister;

a data warehouse;

a stream manager; and

a client manager.

13 . A method of integrating data, comprising:

providing a graphical user interface for a user to create a graphical representation of a business process execution language (BPEL) business process having at least one activity block representing a BPEL activity to be performed on at least one data source;

generating a BPEL document for a business process generated by said user with said graphical user interface; and

executing said BPEL document in a run time environment of an application server.

14 . The method of claim 13 , wherein said executing includes:

parsing said BPEL document;

generating a document object model of said business process;

compiling an executable object model of said business process from said document object model; and

running said executable object model.

15 . The method of claim 14 , wherein said running said executable object model comprises: assigning a virtual processor to execute said executable object model.

16 . The method of claim 13 , further comprising:

in a proxy training session, receiving instructions to record web navigation and extraction information to define data to be automatically extracted by at least one proxy; and

in response to said executing said BPEL document, utilizing said at least one proxy to perform a web navigation and extraction to retrieve data for said business process.

17 . The method of claim 13 , further comprising:

receiving streaming data from a data provider; and

providing streaming data to a subscriber; and

in response to said executing said BPEL document, accessing subscribed streaming data for said business process.

18 . The method of claim 13 , wherein said executing said BPEL document, comprises:

for a first type of activity, accessing a first class of data sources using .NET™ web services; and for a second type of activity, accessing a second class of data sources using Java web services.

19 . The method of claim 13 , wherein executing said BPEL document comprises:

for a first type of activity, accessing a first class of data sources using .NET™ web services, said first class including at least one of rich text format (RTF), Excel, and portable data file (PDF) document file types; and

for a second type of activity, accessing a second class of data sources using Java web services, said second class of data sources including at least one of a database, real time data from streaming data, and navigation and extraction of network documents.