Object-Business Process Mapping Frameworks: Abstractions, Architecture, and Implementation

The integration between enterprise architectures and Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) is currently based on low-level programming interfaces that expose accidental complexities typical of process implementations. This paper describes an approach for integrating software architectures and BPMSs, based on mapping frameworks. Our inspiration are the Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks widely used to shield information systems from low-level structures exposed by relational database systems. The paper describes the central abstractions that should be provided by Object -- Business Process Mapping Frameworks (OBPM). We also propose a reference architecture for implementing OBPMs and a concrete OBPM implementation, called NextFlow. We evaluated our approach by comparing two implementations of the same system, one using NextFlow and another using the native API supported by jBPM, a popular BPMS. By using NextFlow, we achieved a reduction of 30% in terms of lines of code, 35% in terms of number of classes, and 90% in terms of import statements, when implementing this system.