Introduction to Application Deployment

This document tells you how to deploy and undeploy, on a TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM installation, BPM applications that have been designed in TIBCO Business Studio. It also tells you how to go about upgrading deployed projects when new versions have been produced in TIBCO Business Studio.

An application is deployed to BPM by deploying one or more TIBCO Business Studio projects to a BPM server. The project is the unit of deployment, so you cannot choose to deploy only part of a project.

A project can contain one or more of the following:

  • Packages. A package is a container, in XPDL format, for one or more processes.
  • Processes. A process models the actual business process in an organization. A process may include sub-processes.
  • Forms. You can define forms to collect user input in a user task within a business process
  • Business Object Model. A business object model is a set of business terms and relationships specific to your corporate environment (for example, in a financial environment, broker, counterparty, and so on).
  • Emulations. You can add emulation files that allow you to emulate a process and add test data at certain activities, thus enabling you to check the data flow at various activities in a process.
  • Organization Models. An organization model defines the organizational structure of your enterprise and the relationships between the different components (for example, organization units and positions) within your organization.
  • Service Descriptors. Service assets include the WDSL files for any web services that you import into your project.
  • TIBCO SOA Platform. If you want to deploy an application to the TIBCO SOA Platform, you need to create the special folders to contain the SOA assets. See in the appropriate BPM Composite Development Guide for more information about developing applications for use with the TIBCO SOA Platform.
  • Business Assets. There are two categories of project-related business assets in TIBCO Business Studio:
    • Quality Process. Business cases, project plans, and so on.
    • Ad-hoc Assets. Supporting documents, spreadsheets, and so on that are not part of the quality process.

Not all of these need be in the same project: see "Distribution of Assets Across Multiple Projects" in the TIBCO Business Studio BPM Implementation Guide.

However the project is the unit of deployment, so you cannot deploy a subset of a project. For example, if you are designing an application that uses a main business process with sub-processes depending on it, you might put the sub-processes into different XPDL packages within the same project, so that different people can easily work on them at the same time. Because the sub-processes are all part of the same project, if one sub-process changes you cannot redeploy it separately. If you have processes which you do want to deploy separately, you must organize them initially into separate projects.