Agile Enterprise Application Development with Flex

Chapter 10. Developing Flex Applications for LiveCycle Enterprise Suite

Good design can’t fix a broken business model.

—Jeffrey Veen

Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES) as an enterprise server platform is targeted at automation of business processes. One example of a business process is a hardware retail store that sells nails and hammers. The retailer orders the goods online from one of the known suppliers. Assume that an explicit approval of the supplier is required for each ordered item. Because the supplier wants to be able to fulfill all the orders, the supplier attempts to predict the demand.

To that end, the supplier monitors the inventory and, when the level is beyond a certain threshold, reorders the items from a manufacturer. The supplier’s orders also need to be approved by the manufacturer. The activities between the companies occur in a predefined sequence: order-approval-reorder-approval. On a more granular level, within each company there is a certain business process as well: receiving orders, ordering materials and parts, production, quality assurance, invoicing, shipping, and so forth.

Business process automation assumes software-based modeling of the process as well as software-based enforcement of the model that ensures that the process activities are consistently handled by the process participants: retailer, supplier, manufacturer, and so forth. Often, such software is called workflow or business process management (BPM) software.

Unlike other workflow products, ...