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 first introduced the notion of croquis for BPEL and was planned to be extended for other Petals components.
Although there is no more BPEL croquis, the concept still exists in the studio.

Croquis are Petals projects that contain 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 EIP. EIP are usually used in chains. A single EIP is very often useless in real life cases.
With the Petals EIP component, every EIP results in a service unit. So, EIP SU can be created individually, but it is hard task.

This is why an EIP croquis was created.
It proposes a graphical editor to build an EIP chain. Once the chain is done, it can be exported into SU and SA projects that can be deployed in Petals.

Croquis in action

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

Then, you have to follow the indications on the screen (or to read the documentation associated with every croquis type).