BPEL Learning Guide

I came across a pretty good learning guide on BPEL -- published by SearchWebServices

Java developers need to publish synchronous and asynchronous Web services and compose them into reliable and transactional business flows. Web service orchestration standards (SOAP Conversation, BPEL4WS and WS-Transaction) are emerging and need to be packaged into a reliable and easy-to-manage software solution. So we've gathered a wealth of information to get you up-to-speed quickly.

The gathered wealth of information looks quite comprehensive. For those getting started with BPEL, this might be a good start!

Clarification from Oasis - on BPXL

Reported by CBROnline:

From Oasis --

...in an interview with ComputerWire late last week, OASIS president and CEO Patrick Gannon said that BPXL would complement BPEL, and in no way conflict with it. He said BPEL was never intended to solve every issue in process management: "The charter for the [BPEL] work was laid out very explicitly; it was very clear what the work would be," said Gannon.

"It was not designed to solve all of the problems in the process management space. We are focusing on the core specification first, then we will later produce extensions or profiles, which will be voted on," he said. "We will take input from a variety of areas."

And from BPMI.org --

Meanwhile Jeanne Baker, chair of BPMI.org, also insisted that the BPXL work is in no way intended to derail or rival BPEL: "We endorse BPEL and we endorse OASIS," said Baker. "The industry needs a single standard, not a confusion of standards." But she added that BPMI.org's planned Business Process eXtension Layers (BPXL) standard will add capabilities not inherent in BPEL.

Hope that brings some order !

The Web Services Stack

From the Web Serices Roadmap. The Web Services Stack:

..and updates on this page

Updates: Oct 2004. Added WS-Enumeration, WS-Transfer, WS-CDL, oBIX, WS-MessageDelivery, and various updates to status.
May 2004. Added ebSOA, FWSI, Translation WS, WS-Discovery, Ws-MetadataExchange
March 2004. Added WS-Notification
updated Figures 2 and 3 to reflect latest information
January 2004, Added ASAP, SOAP MTOM, WS-AtomicTransaction, WS-Eventing, WS-Provisioning.
Updated DIME, WS-Attachements, WS-Interactive Applications, WS-Transaction. Refreshed some URLs.

This stack seems pretty comprehensive. There is no doubt that many of these standards will enable interoperability between services and ofcourse portability. What concerns me is the overlap between these standards in some cases, and the lack of scoping of these standards.

BPMI.org confirms plans to expand BPEL

As seen on Computer Business Online - BPEL to expand

BPMI.org board member Derek Miers confirmed in an interview with ComputerWire that the standards body is working on what it is calling Business Process eXtension Layers (BPXL), a standard that would help to enable interoperability between process modeling tools and process management engines.

"We need to do this because it is clear that going through the OASIS Technical Committee process that developed BPEL would be too much of a long, drawn-out process," said Miers. "It took nine months just to get to where we are with BPEL. Without it [the new BPXL plans], there is a whole range of things that BPEL does not address. Things like human collaboration, tasks, longer running processes, transaction roll-back and the like. The OASIS Technical Committee process is just going to be too slow to address that."

I agree that BPEL has some deficiencies -- notably the one's mentioned in this article and a few more. Future versions of BPEL will tackle these issues, no doubt. My concern is with these parallel extensions. Where are we headed in the standards soup ? The current web services stack is quite complicated as it is.

CommerceQuest and BPEL modeling

CBR Online reports:

So far, CommerceQuest has announced the ability for models built in the third-party Corel Corp iGrafx and Mindjet Ltd modeling tools to be executed within its Traxion Enterprise Business Process Management Suite. The company said the integration of the popular process models iGrafx and Mindjet with an execution engine, such as its Traxion BPMS, should enable organizations to complete the entire business process lifecycle with combined analysis, mapping, and execution capabilities.

But in an interview with ComputerWire, CommerceQuest CTO Paul Roth said: "We want to take that further and work with BPMI.org on a standard which will close the gap between models and the execution manager." Roth said that such a standard would open BPEL (business process execution language), a standard for executing business processes, to a much wider audience. He said BPEL is "very limited, because to use BPEL today you need to create proprietary interfaces [between the model and BPEL], so then you are locked into one vendor's models or engine."

There seems to be a general consensus appearing in the BPEL execution model. Better modeling tools a the higher level is another facet which will make BPEL's adoption universal.

ObjectWeb making waves ?

ObjectWeb has been in the news quite often recently. The business model - "Make money supporting solutions not selling software".
As reported by ZDNet.

The benefits of open source include cost savings--buyers typically pay only for support, not for the software itself. There's also little of the haggling over long-term licenses and upgrade rights that comes with commercial software from Microsoft and other companies. Additional applications are easy to plug in as companies grow. And, if needed, the source code is readily available.
All sides agree that commercial server software suites will continue to have the most advanced features, at least for the foreseeable future. But the software programmers and entrepreneurs behind these open-source middleware projects intend to compete head-to-head with established providers.
Ney added that ObjectWeb is developing products usually associated with big-ticket software, such as integration and business process automation software based on the Business Process Execution Language, or BPEL, specification.

"No Dents so far" -- was interesting to note. I see software vendors like IBM being well placed, no matter if a dent is created or not. IBM views solutions/services as its primary source of income.

So far, big commercial software companies deny that open-source alternatives are eating into their market share and profit margins. In fact, Sun Microsystems said it has considered making editions of its Java application server suite available as an open-source product.

Although open-source middleware still accounts for only a fraction of the total market, overall use of open-source applications and of Linux continues to grow. More than 80 percent of big companies surveyed say they have at least some Linux deployed within their organizations, according to market researcher Gartner.

Semantic Web at Ebiquity

Our research group features a blog at:
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/v2.1/blogger/


This is more in the space of Semantic Web, Pervasive Computing and Adhoc Networks.

Cape Clear and SOA

As seen on XMLMania:

Cape Clear's marketing approach for their orchestrator:
"1) Design
An Eclipse-based tool that provides an intuitive graphical environment for designing business processes based on the BPEL language. It includes wizards that step users through the creation of new processes and enables the rapid orchestration of existing Web services into the environment to radically reduce the time and cost of developing business processes.

2) Runtime
A fully featured native BPEL 1.1 engine that provides a powerful deployment environment for BPEL business processes. The engine supports the full range of qualities of service for long-running and asynchronous processes.

3) Management
A comprehensive capability including the ability to monitor and control deployed business flows. This includes support for fault handling and event handling, and configurable business rules based on the content of message flow in the orchestration."

More BPEL engines - ObjectWeb

As reported by BusinessWire:
" MOBE (MidOffice BPEL Engine) is a business process execution engine compliant with the OASIS standard BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). MOBE is used by Dutch companies and local government agencies such as the municipality of Almere, Netherlands.

In June 2004 ObjectWeb launched a market-driven initiative to federate the development of open-source components allowing commercial vendors to build ESB-related offerings. Formerly proposed as a commercial product, MOBE has been announced in open-source by ObjectWeb Dutch member company eMaxx in August 2004 with the first goal of being evaluated in the framework of the Enterprise Service Bus initiative. "

More importantly MOBE is opensource.

SOA from many vendors

Internet News Reports:

"Sandra Rogers, program director of SOA and Web services for IDC, said in a statement the offering should make it easier for customers to set up an SOA, driving down total cost of ownership.

Writing Web services infrastructure software for customers makes sense. According to IDC, the Web services software space will reach $3.2 billion by 2008. "

.. and some more news about vendor support for BPEL and BPM. Way to go !

History of the Web

The World Wide Web has globalized Knowledge Representation. So how is the web evolving?
A brief history from 1945 to 1995 is available at the W3C site. From this page --
Sir TimBl's ideas on the Semantic Web dates back to 1994 and even earlier. Slides available here. A snippet from this presentation:
"For example, a document might describe a person. The title document to a house describes a house and also the ownership relation with a person.

Adding semantics to the web involves two things: allowing documents which have information in machine-readable forms, and allowing links to be created with relationship values. Only when we have this extra level of semantics will we be able to use computer power to help us exploit the information to a greater extent than our own reading."

A slide from his talk: