-What Is an Orchestration Process?

This blog post explains what an orchestration process is with regard to the Orchex Enterprise Orchestration Engine (EOE).

• https://deliverystack.net/2025/02/08/what-is-an-enterprise-orchestration-engine-eoe/

This post is part of a collection:

• https://deliverystack.net/2025/02/01/introducing-the-orchex-enterprise-orchestration-engine/

Update 15.Dec.2025: After years of frustration with WordPress, I am finally abandoning this blog. The content will likely stay here for some time, but new content will appear here:

• jpw3.com

An orchestration process takes an HTTP request as input and returns JSON, referred to as constructing a payload. An orchestration process typically invokes some number of webservice APIs. Orchestration processes consist of orchestration processors, each of which can call a webservice API and invoke JavaScript to shape its input and output, often using data obtained from other webservice API calls (see diagram above). Note that clients can include other applications, not just browsers and other user-level systems.

For example, you may use an orchestration engine to abstract services used by digital channels such as a website. A website built on composable architecture typically uses services from a headless content management system, often in conjunction with a headless search engine, a headless commerce solution, a customer data platform, and other service-oriented systems. In this context, headless just means that the vendor does not provide or dictate front-end technologies but exposes all data and capabilities through JSON endpoints.

In a typical composable architecture, each of these systems (as well as potentially an application, site generation process, or other content delivery solution), along with all clients such as browsers, interacts with each of the other systems directly. With an orchestration engine, to the extent possible, orchestration processes mediate interfaces between applications.

With Orchex, you define the orchestration processes that you need using webservice APIs, JavaScript, and JSON. JavaScript fragments in orchestration processors transform and normalize input and output between systems, as well as implement arbitrary logic in orchestration processes.