Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
Appian is the first product to marry the concepts of Service Oriented Architecture with business user control and design of application logic and process flow. The most common representation of a SOA object in the market has become a Web Service. Web Services are powerful and flexible ways to allow any application to quickly re-use programmatic logic through a simple web interface. But, a Web Service is still a complex programmatic API with WSDL definitions, data mappings, and compensations that only more advanced IT users know how to properly deploy. Appian introduces a new way of wrapping common SOA objects, such as Web Services and Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) into more easily understood Appian Smart Services. The Appian Smart Service is designed to encapsulate the complex logic, WSDL mappings, compensations, and even GUI form interface into a simple, re-usable service object that can be understood and deployed by more common business users.

This packaging of complex SOA API calls into Appian Smart Services provides the perfect balance between IT control over complex integrations and API interactions and business user control over process and business logic. In addition, Appian provides the infrastructure for an organization to start building a library of service objects for rapid orchestration and management in processes and applications.

To accelerate an organization's construction of this service library, Appian comes pre-populated with over 85 process actions and over 250 rule expression actions to control all aspects of actions and quickly create business rules. Furthermore, Appian includes a Java Eclipse design environment for IT developers to quickly create and extend the library of Appian Smart Services.

Web Services Support
The Appian Process Modeler can further be directly integrated into 3rd party services from the process modeler tool. IT users can utilize the packaged Web Service, Database and JMS generic Smart Services to quickly create direct connections to 3rd party applications from a process model. The generic Web Service node enables IT users to browse UDDI directories, discover methods, and map WSDL result sets to input and output parameters for activities.

In addition, as processes are published to the Appian repository, process models may be exposed as a Web Service for invocation by other applications. The Appian platform includes a native UDDI directory to enable 3rd party applications to easily browse a library of potential processes to invoke and discover the parameters for each process model.

SOA for User Interface Design
Often overlooked by other BPM tools, is the use of SOA concepts in the construction of user interfaces. Orchestrating a process is often only half the battle in getting a new process-based application online. The complex forms and dashboards that power the human-facing side of a process can be equally complex to build as the original process diagram. Often other tools abandon SOA methodologies and force customers to hard code application logic into each form, making management and maintenance difficult. Appian brings the same SOA approach from the Appian Process Modeler to the construction of Forms and Dashboards.

The Appian Forms Designer includes an extensible framework based on SOA methodologies that enables IT users to create complex form actions while business users can determine simple layout and form logic. Forms often include the need to read and write information to 3rd party systems to retrieve key data for display. These actions are often complex and require careful planning by IT organizations to ensure database tables are properly tuned and secure communication is established. Appian allows individual form inputs to be developed by IT to perform these complex actions that are then registered to a library of re-usable form input actions for use by a business user. For example, an IT developer can create a rich form input action that lists parts from inventory stored in an SAP system. Once the input is created, the new object can be easily placed on any form using the drag-and-drop Appian Forms Designer.

In addition, Appian extends SOA concepts to dashboard construction. Powered by an enterprise level J2EE portal environment, Appian allows IT developers to quickly create new portlet channels for incorporation into any dashboard. Once created, business users can quickly construct rich dashboards that combine any of the 21 packaged Appian portlet channels with channels developed by IT to incorporate more data from 3rd party systems.