Related terms
Informally, a headless application is a business process management application that uses flows and other standard Pega 7 Platform BPM elements, but has no user interface at all, or presents forms, assignments, and other information to users through an external mechanism, rather than user forms.
For example an application that delivers straight-through-processing can be characterized as "headless".
A headless application can present forms to users using Active Server Pages (ASP), Java Server Pages (JSP) or similar technologies. Communication from the client system to Pega 7 Platform can occur through JSR-94 services, SOAP services, or other services.
The Process Engine API, a collection of standard activities that apply to the Work- base class, provides a way for headless applications to execute flows, bypassing all Show-HTML methods. Select Designer Studio> Process and Rules > Process > Application Programmer Interface to access a list of these facilities.
A UNIX server that has no X11 display component installed is called headless. Pega 7 Platform does not require X11, but uses Pure Java AWT Jar files (pja.jar and pjatools.jar) when X11 is not installed.