During the last decades, the digital business transformation has been a reality that has resulted in the increasingly abundant use of different technologies at all levels of organization in order to maintain competitiveness in the market whether in terms of product, production, costs, quality and others. This results in the need for a technical team (department of information technology or IT) expert in each and every one of the technologies used in order to integrate them according to business processes. Owning such a team is usually non-existent in small and medium-sized companies, generating very high costs in contracting services and limiting decision-making in the company due to the complexity or ignorance of the part that addresses each technology within business processes.
This project aims to initiate the development of software capable of executing, modeling and simplifying the integration of different computer programs through the design and configuration of workflows. With this, companies could integrate different technologies without the need of contracting experts from each of the computer programs and thus reduce the costs of hiring external services.
It has been possible to develop a web service in which the HTML5 Canvas element is used to allows the graphic representation for the design of workflows, within a software developed in the java programming language with which to automate the execution of computer programs and communication between these. This communication has been made through the standard process input and the use of internet sockets.
Workflow, Process Automation, Process, IPC, Inter-Process-Communication, Flow Design, Reactive Programming
The great progress of the different tools for the EAI, both with the support of different communication formats and with the use of graphic tools for the design of integrations have proven to be a success as with the use of the IBM Connect API that has been used by Telefónica, "The growth was exponential and thanks to the IBM solution we started to upload different services very easily, something that used to cost us a lot" explains Santiago Gatti, employee of Telefónica (IBM bets on the transformation of business with the new technologies, 2019). Therefore, this project, although with a great path to follow, has shown that it can offer features very similar to those offered by IBM App Connect in the simplification of application integration, but with the advantage of reaching small and medium enterprises that many times avoid digital transformation due to high costs.
In addition, the simplicity of the design of workflows on the web allows us to understand the relationship between the different applications that a company can use and, in this way, bring the people in charge of the organization towards a better decision making in relation to the involvement of applications in the organization.
The development of this project has been a great complement in the formation of the degree in Software Engineering due to the variety of technologies that have been involved and the depth of each of these. Thus, the construction of processes, the use of signals, flow control and communication between processes has been one of the main emphasis in the development of the entire project. Thanks to this aspect, the student has been able to learn more about the operation of current business applications and understand the implications of engineering decisions in the development of these, in addition, it has allowed the student to understand the importance of security in web applications and of the adaptability of websites through the implications of using these applications in business environments as different and complex as they can be achieved.
Another of the conclusions that can be drawn in the development of this project has been the success in the use of web technologies generally oriented to the design of videogames, as in the case of PixiJS and similar frameworks, in business fields, thus taking advantage of these regarding the interaction with the client, and the visual representation of complex processes.
Due to the development from scratch of this work and time constraints, future work is very broad. One of the main advantages that could have been taken advantage of was the use of WSO2 open source projects in order to take advantage of their success in using such varied communication standards.
Also, the workflow design still contains errors as in the case of nested loops that must be corrected. As well as, the management of the different processes could be used not only to execute applications but also to extract usage statistics from each of them.
Also, adding other process communication protocols, as well as allowing greater configuration possibilities in the use of those already implemented as in the case of sockets, would open a wider range of configurations to communicate processes both in distributed systems and in not distributed
Another feature to take advantage of is the execution of processes, where it could allow the execution on different servers to reach a distributed scale of computing or make use of containers to isolate the execution of processes and / or allow to combine different systems.
In addition, the use of Bootstrap modals could be improved in the design of flows to simplify the construction of forms in a more dynamic and simple way using component-based frameworks.
Finally, it would be interesting to conduct research on new forms of communication between processes using the graphical interface or by automating the normal interactions of a user through it.
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