In IBM Business Process Manager , applications are developed as process applications by the BPM solution developers. A process application is a container for process models and their implementations. It can contain the following artifacts:

• Process artifacts (from Process Designer)
  • Business process models (business process definitions)
  • Coaches
  • Services that are required to implement activities or to integrate with other systems
  • Toolkits that the process application depends on
• Integration artifacts (from Integration Designer)
  • SCA modules
  • SCA libraries
• Monitoring artifacts (from Integration Designer)
  • Monitor models
• Other items required to run the process

Process application snapshots record the state of the items within a process application at a specific point in time and represent a specific version of your process application. The snapshot contains all the components that are part of the process application and the dependent toolkits.

Process application snapshots can be created from the Process Center console or in the Process Designer view. The snapshots are managed from the Process Center console and represent the deployment unit that gets deployed to online and offline process servers. You can deploy process application snapshots to process center servers (development environment) and to process servers (test, staging, or production environment). To deploy to a stand-alone process server, you must take a snapshot of the process application, because this artifact is the only artifact that you can deploy to process servers.

Besides snapshots for process applications, you can also create snapshots for toolkits. Toolkit snapshots are only deployed when you deploy a process application snapshot that depends on this toolkit snapshot. This way, the owners of the process applications can decide whether they want to use the new version of the toolkit.

If you have IBM Business Process Manager Advanced and your process application contains not only artifacts from Process Designer but also artifacts from WebSphere Integration Developer, then a business level application (BLA) is created under the covers. It is a container for the process application and its assets (for example, monitor models). In addition, each snapshot of such an advanced process application has its own BLA.

BLAs are created automatically for process applications/process application snapshots under the covers. Do not manage BLAs manually using the WebSphere Application Server administrative console.

The tip is a special snapshot containing the most recent content of the process application. When your BPM analysts and solution developers change a process application, the changes are automatically saved to the Process Center repository at the tip of the working track. This situation means that the tip is the only snapshot where you can change contents. This configuration is useful during development, and for that reason the tip can be run only on the development environment (the Process Center Server). Tips cannot be deployed to all other environments (to Process Servers).

Tracks can be compared to branches in version control systems. Tracks allows parallel development to occur with isolation from changes in other tracks. Tracks are especially important in the context of fixing problems in a version of a process application that is already deployed to production. By using tracks, the development on a new version can continue in parallel to fix the problems in an older version. Tracks do not support merging capabilities. When a developer fixes a problem in a track, the fix also needs to be applied to the main track so that it is included.