Category: Business Process Management

OASIS Announces Choreology Joining the JBoss Community

OASIS has just sent out an announcement that Choreology has joined the JBoss community which will bolster the support for Business Transaction Management. This will allow for the JBoss Application Server and JBoss jBPM (Business Process Management) to act as coordination points in distributed services deployed across heterogeneous environments.

Choreology's product is called Cohesions and implements OASIS Business Transaction Protocol and Web Services Coordination+Transaction.

Links
Choreology Home Site
JBoss Home Site

JSR 207: Business Processes in Java

The Java Community Process has a new specification request called JSR 207. The specification page defines the specification request as:

“The specification will define metadata, interfaces, and a runtime model that enable business processes to be easily and rapidly implemented using the Java language and deployed in J2EETM containers. Process Definition for Java will provide a functional foundation upon which J2EE programmers can implement business processes. This foundation will support tasks commonly encountered when programming business processes, for example parallel execution and asynchronous messaging, while leveraging the programming constructs of Java. As such, the foundation can also be used to build Java implementations of business process initiatives such as BPEL4WS, WSCI, and W3C Choreography.”

I will try and monitor this specification and provide any updates as it develops.

Links
JSR 207 Specification Request

JBoss Formally Enters Middleware Market

JBoss is formally announcing its move to expand its capabilities into the middleware market. By expanding its capabilities JBoss will start to compete against the BEA and IBM giants. One capability that interests me is support for a Business Process Engine developed by Tom Baeyens called jBpm (Java Business Process Management). This expands JBoss' components to include:

• JBoss Application Server
• EJB 3.0
• Hibernate (Object/Relational Java Persistence and Query Service)
• Javassist (Java class library for editing Java bytecode in Java)
• JBoss AOP (Aspect Oriented Framework)
• JBoss Cache (Replicated and transactional Cache)
• JBoss IDE (Development Environment built inside Eclipse)
• JBoss jBPM (Process Engine)
• JBoss Mail (email server)
• JBoss Portal (Portal implementation)
• JGroups (Reliable multicast communication)
• Tomcat (JSP and Servlet Engine)

It will be interesting to see how tight a package is created and whether it works easily without too much hair pulling.

Links
ComputerWorld Article
JBoss Site
JBpm Site

Workflow Patterns Site

Here is a very interesting site about workflow patterns. One very interesting section of the site is a list of standards (including XPDL, BPEL4WS, BPML, WSFL, XLANG, and WSCI) and the features that each support or lack. Another great feature of the site are the flash animations of the different patterns.

Links
Workflow Patterns Site

JBoss Now Includes Business Process Capabilities

JBoss has recently incorporated the open source jBPM project into its J2EE application server renaming the product JBoss jBPM. This expands the JBoss open source J2EE platform to provide business process functionality and support for various workflow definition standards.

Links
InfoWorld Article on JBoss support for BPM
JBoss website
JBoss jBPM website

IBM WebSphere 6 Announced

IBM has announced that its new version of WebSphere Application Server Version 6 will be available in December 2004. This is a key release from my point of view as this will be the first release of IBMs J2EE application server to support the J2EE 1.4 standards and of most importance includes Web Services as standard. In the previous J2EE standard Web Services were not included as a core technology, therefore each handled Web Services differently. This created a nightmare when moving code between J2EE servers implemented by different vendors. A pre release of WebSphere Application Server Version 6 has been available to developers for quite some time on the IBM website and is still available if you want to try it out before the official release in December.

Links
IBM Website
The Register Article on WebSphere 6
ZDNet Article on WebSphere 6
CNet Article on WebSphere 6
IBM WebSphere Developer Pre-release Download

Apache Project Agila

Apache has a new incubator project called Agila that is a donation from Gluecode. Agila is a lightweight Business Process Management (BPM) service. This is yet one more step closer to the Apache Foundation having a complete middleware stack to rival the larger software companies like IBM, BEA or Microsoft.

Links
Apache Agila
Gluecode Website

Gluecode and Geromino

Gluecode who produces Portal and Business Process products has announced its support of the Open Source Geronimo project. Geronimo is an Apache Foundation project working towards releasing an open source J2EE container to rival the large J2EE providers like IBM and BEA.

Links
Apache Geronimo
Gluecode
Gluecode Products Page
Article on Gluecodes support to Geronimo

ActiveBPEL becomes opensource

Active Endpoints has announced that its BPEL runtime engine has been released as open source. For more information read the press release or the article on TheServerSide.com site.

Links
ActiveBPEL Engine
Active Endpoints Press Release
TheServerSide.com Article

An Overview of Business Process Management (BPM)

InfoWorld has done it again by providing yet again a very interesting article about Business Process Management (BPM) by Eric Knorr. This article talks mainly about the use of the BPEL standard in supporting BPM but it does do a very good job of defining the overall problem and context of BPM and how BPEL supports business modeling. The article also concludes with a very brief (and I mean short) look at some of the other standards also being developed. What is still required is a good comparison between each of the competing standards, there is some work that I am conducting that should provide this outcome.

Links
Go to InfoWorld Article
Email Eric Knorr

Oracle ventures into Web Services, SOA, BPEL and J2EE

Oracle has been involved in J2EE application servers for quite some time now with their Oracle Application Server but with their newest release they are surfing the web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) wave. The newest version of JDeveloper supports full Model-View-Controller (MVC) implementations using a selection of technologies/standards including Struts, Java Server Faces (JSF), Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), Java Server Pages (JSP) to develop your applications. To support SOA Oracle is supporting full development of Web Services and now includes BPEL support for services process execution modelling and execution via the recently acquired Oracle BPEL Process Manager product. All these technologies can be combined and developed using the graphical JDeveloper environment that also allows the developer to view the underlying XML structures. For more information about Oracle's Web Services support and the components supporting SOA, BPEL and MVC development go to this page.

Links
Oracle Web Services Page
Oracle Application Server
Oracle BPEL Process Manager product
JDeveloper

BPEL - Business Process Execution Language

BPEL is still in the press and news feeds as the next new thing in the Web Services space. BPEL is a definition language that uses XML to define business processes at a level where business analysts can define an enterprises processes but in a structure that can be used to execute this defined process and coordinate web service activation.

A new article at InfoWorld talks about the BPEL standard. But BPEL is not the only fish in the sea with WSCI (Web Services Choreography Interface) and WSCL (Web Services Conversation Language) as competing standards under development by the W3C standards organisation. BPEL is being developed under the OASIS standards organisation and is supported by some of the larger application and middleware vendors like IBM, BEA and Microsoft. To stop the W3C and OASIS fighting about these standards Oracle and a few other vendors are starting work to coordinate between these standards efforts. The idea is for BPEL to focus on the internal processes while WSCL on external processes so that these two languages are complimentary. Time will tell as to which standard becomes dominant.

BPML and BPEL4WS

The Business Process Modeling Initiative (BPMI) is an interesting organisation responsible for the development of three specifications, BPML (Business Processes Modeling Language), BPMN (Business Processing Modeling Notation), BPQL (Business Process Query Language). These specifications are to be used for the design and development of business processes. If you are familiar with BPEL then BPML is a superset of BPEL, for more details on the interelation then read this very short article. Also of interest is that the BPMI site has a very good list of articles about the Business Process modelling space and can be found here.

Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)

Many organisations and vendors are now providing external interfaces to applications via web services. These web services allow external applications to access the services or interact with the internal capabilities of the application. This simple service architecture allows for the basic application interaction and integration between systems, however these simple service framework does not support coordination to support workflows where a series of web services need to be called to support a single business process.

A new standard currently under development is the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) that defines these business processes. An extension to BPEL is BPEL for Web Service (BPEL4WS) that defines how BPEL can be used to define the required workflows when using web services.

IBM has released an article that describes the use of BPEL4WS in IBM WebSphere J2EE Server. The BPEL standard can be found in a number of locations on the Internet (go here).

For a List of the different web services both IBM and Microsoft provide a list of standards:
Go to IBM Web Services Standards Page
Go to Microsoft's Web Services Standards Page