Visually scripting portable BPMN script tasks

A script task is an executable element of a BPMN process model. It is a task that executes an associated script written in a particular scripting language. Most existing process modeling tools provide text editors for scripting without any code assist features. It is therefore not so easy for process modelers who may not have the required programming skills to write scripts. Moreover, a process model associated with a script written in a particular language can be executed only on certain process execution engines that support such a language. To make a script task easier to define as well as portable, this paper presents a method to create a script for a BPMN script task using visual programming. A process modeler can conveniently use the visual script building blocks to compose a script. The visual script is then transformed into an XML-based Business Process Script or XBPScript that is a common representation of computation logic among scripting languages. This XBPScript will be associated with a script task instead of a language-specific script. This makes the script portable as it can be generated later into an executable script of a language that is supported by the target process execution engine during process deployment.