Patent ID: 8185916

Claim:
A system for integrating business processes with web services in a distributed computing environment, said system comprising: a computer, wherein the computer includes a non-transitory computer readable storage medium; a business process management component used to model and define one or more business processes stored on the non-transitory computer readable storage medium, wherein each business process includes a set of activities linked by transitions, and wherein each activity represents a step of a particular process, and wherein at least one activity in the set of activities of said particular business process invokes a proxy service to obtain access to an external service; an enterprise service bus that manages one or more web services and performs routing and transformation of messages between said one or more web services; an application programming interface that connects said business process management component to the enterprise service bus via a management extension; a transport that describes each business process as a web service to connect said business process management component to said enterprise service bus, wherein each of said one or more business processes is exposed as a web service on said enterprise service bus, and wherein the external service invoked by the particular business process is available as a web service on the enterprise service bus; and wherein the application programming interface uses one or more managed beans of the management extension to perform operations on each web service.