What to import from Java to deploy BPEL in ODE?

Question

I have downloaded the ODE WAR Distribution and deployed it inside my Java Webapp project.

When I need to deploy my BPEL process I just copy all the .bpel .wsdl deploy.xml etc in the WEB-INF/processes folder and it works.

I have the feeling this is not the proper way of doing things: There is a lot of bulk client side html and js I dont need. Besides I need to provide the functionality of the Manamgemet API I have to expose.

My guess is there must be some way of importing only the deployment Web Service and the Managment API and use them straight from Java.

How can this be achieved? What do I need to download and import?

EDIT: Are there any advantages of using the API to deploy a process in ODE instead of just copying the files straight into the process folder?

Answer 1

First off: The web console is optional, you can package your own war file with ODE by adding all jars into WEB-INF/lib and adding the ODE/Axis2 related servlets to your web.xml. Of course, some of the resources like config files are needed by ODE, but you don't have to include all HTML/JS/CSS/JSP files.

Regarding the deloyment it depends of your context and usecases. While the hotdeployment provides an easy way to deploy process models, you need to manually take care of versioning. If you however use the deployment API (a WSDL web service), ODE will take care of the naming conventions for process versions. If you want to deploy process models remotely, I'd recommend this way. If you want to ship ODE with predefined processes, I'd go for the hot-deployment approach.