Developing Enterprise Web Services: An Architect's Guide

Building Evolvable and Composable Workflows

The previous revision of the enterprise procurement application relied on a static HTML page and a human to drive the application. While this may be a suitable approach for a small business, it does not scale well. In a large enterprise it may be preferable to capture the knowledge of the human operator and automate the process, freeing the human operator to work on more interesting work and allowing the process to execute more quickly.

A simple automation solution would involve screen-scraping techniques to allow a computer program that has been written to mimic the behavior of a human operator to drive the Web page itself via standard HTTP commands. However, this is a rather poor and brittle approach ...