Sketch (Dictionary)

Sketch:
1. A hasty or undetailed drawing or painting often made as a preliminary study.
2. A brief general account or presentation; an outline.

Source: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/sketch

A synonym (and transparent word in French) is croquis.
If initially, the word "sketch" was used in the studio, it is now progressively replaced by the word croquis.

Croquis

Petals Studio introduced the notion of sketch (or croquis, that's the same) for BPEL.
But this notion may also be extended to EIP and SCA.

A croquis is a Petals project that contains resources to generate Service-Unit (SU) and Service Assembly (SA) projects.
They aim at simplifying the use of some components, that may be complicated to work with a usual approach (i.e. with a SU project).

Let's take the example of BPEL. BPEL processes to be run in Petals must respect some constraints that do not apply in other servers (e.g. Apache ODE or OW2 Orchestra). Indeed, such elements are always service providers, but are also service consumers. Petals sets constraints about these consumers: any service being consumed by a Petals BPEL process must be a Petals service. A BPEL process that is executed in Petals cannot directly invoke a service that is hosted outside the bus. This external service must be imported (made visible would be a better expression) in Petals first.

If the calls did not target Petals services, then the messages would not go through the bus.
And therefore, the bus would be useless for them.

With a sketch project, you do not have to worry about whether a consumed service is a Petals service or not.
A croquis allows you to design your BPEL process independently of Petals constraints.

Such a project can then be transformed into a set of concrete Petals projects, updating if necessary the BPEL artifacts to make them run in Petals.
Amond the generated projects, there can be those which import the external services in Petals.

Croquis in action

Croquis are created using the Petals Croquis wizard (File > New > Petals > Croquis).

The export of a croquis results in the introspection of the croquis' resources (e.g. *.bpel files) and in the proposals of SU and SA projects to create.