Category: Web Standards

Google Gears

The web development or web engineering space has been pretty quiet as late with nothing really new being developed by anyone or any amazing ideas being put into action, until now. The Google guys have done it again with their release of Google Gears. Google Gears is an API for web developers to allow their applications to be run in an offiline mode and therefore accessible while their user's computer is not connected to the Internet. Google Gears supports both Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows, OSX and Linux therefore supporting 99% of the Internet population. Google gears consists of three components, Local Server that stores the web application resources, and local database to store the content for the application and a WorkerPool that allows your applications to be more responsive (somehow).

If you want to see it in action head on over to Google Reader as it has been enabled with Google Gears support or if you are a web developer head on over to the Google Gears Developer page.

Links
Google Gears Home
Google Gears Developer Page
Google Reader

CSS Dock

I am a big fan of Macs, I am also a big fan of good use of technologies for the web. So I bring to you the CSS dock Menu. Ok so maybe it is not really such a good use of web technologies, but it is still impressive.

Links
CSS Dock Article
CSS Dock Demo

Spiffy Corners

So you are using lots of CSS in your site and you want to have rounded rectangles for menus or bounding boxes. Well most of the tutorials that use CSS do this but they are not antialiased. Well with the code shown in Spiffy Coners you can have CSS only rounded corners that are antialiased (smooth) without having to create individual images.

Links
Spiffy Corners

The Future of Web Applications?

Google creates some really nice cross browser AJAX based Javascript applications. Now they have released their internal development environment in a package called the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). This toolkit is Java 2 Enterprise Edition based and resolves around developing your application completely as Java code that then is compiled and turned into Javascript when the client requests a page. This is the same approach as used in Ruby on Rails and has the benefit of cleaning up the code and making it easier to create the server and client side code and they are one and the same with the framework handling the details.

So what is happening here? Well we are starting to see more and more of these frameworks becoming available for web developers to use. These are reducing the complexity to create advanced web applications therefore we are getting more interaction and more true web applications, rather than just web pages that provide a function. I believe that this will continue to grow and the line between web application and standard desktop application will start to blur. What we will see as the next generation are applications that are developed once and run as either server side applications or client hosted applications that then connect back to a data source for their data. This results in write once, run anyway (connected, disconnected, standalone, client/server or even peer to peer).

Links
Google Web Toolkit

XFire: Java Web Services Framework

While browsing through my numerous RSS feeds I stumbled on a release note for the XFire Java Web Service library. There are lots of Java Web Service frameworks available on the Internet and most are available for free use (eg Apache AXIS, Sun's JWSDP, IBM WebSphere, etc). The problem with many of them are that they do not support some of the newest Web Service standards. As I work in a research area where we are always pushing the envelopes and therefore using bleeding edge standards libraries that support the new standards are always useful. XFile supports a number of different bindings including XMLBeans, JAXB and AEGIS (XML to POJO binding) to easily create your back end service code. There is also early support to both WS-Addressing and WS-Security standards, which most Web Service frameworks do not support and to put the icing on the cake it supports multiple transports (including HTTP, JMS, Local and XMPP). More work is still required to make it a complete Web Services framework that supports all the new standards but it is well on its way.

Links
XFire Home Page

Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO)

In the eclipse plugin feed that I am subscribed to I noticed the WSMO Studio plugin. On further research I have found out that this is an editor for the WSML and related ontologies for use in web services. This seems to be a part of the semantic web research that is occurring around the world for trying to correlate, reason and determine relationships between disparate sources of data. This type of research is extremely important when trying to get multiple service be interoperable within a complete Service Oriented Architecture within an Enterprise.

I still have not got a handle on the details of this but I am going to conduct some more research and potentially applying some of this work to my current job. So expect to see some more information about this in the near future.

Links
WSMO Working Group
WSMO Studio

Ruby on Rails with AJAX support

One of my friends and collegues has started using Ruby on Rails and has now become a complete convert, so much so that everything can be done with Rails (short name). Rails is a complete web development stack for creating dynamic web applications with very little fuss and painful configuration that is synonymous with other web development stacks, such as J2EE. I was also pointed in the direction of script.aculo.us that provides AJAX support to Rails by using the Prototype JavaScript Library. Some of the examples at script.aculo.us are drag and drop shopping carts, auto-completing text boxes and pretty JavaScript animations.

Rails is built around using the Ruby programming language, which is easy to learn and quick to develop with. Doing things quickly is the moral of the story when developing with RAILS. By adding Prototype enabled scripts on the client end greater interactivity is created and by using AJAX pages no longer need to be fully reloaded speeding up the response times as only the data is sent through the AJAX bindings. One issue with adding all this JavaScript to the client web pages is that the HTML code can become littered with <script> tags; however, this can be solved by attaching the JavaScript events by using CSS selectors. For a description and example of this approach have a look at the Behaviour web page.

Rails and supporting scripts can all be downloaded from the links below. If you are developing on a mac you can download pre-compiled binaries from here. For Windows users a quick install can be downloaded from here.

Links
Ruby on Rails Homepage
script.aculo.us Homepage
Prototype JavaScript Library Home Page
Behaviour Page
Agile Web Development with Rails Book
Programming with Ruby Book
Rico Homepage (Addition JavaScript Libraries using Prototype)

FacesClient

One of the big problems with developing web application is creating good interactivity for the user without having to refresh the page. Using multiple technologies like AJAX it is possible to enhance this interaction but the work required for developers to achieve this is great. Therefore using the Model View Controller (MVC) concepts from Java Server Faces the FacesClient has been developed. IBM has an implementation of this JavaScript library and components and is available from their AlphaWorks site in the Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK). If you would like to just have a read then below is a link to the FacesClient developer guide.

Links
Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK)
Faces for Laszlo
FacesClient Components, Part 1 : Portlet Programming with FacesClient Components
FacesClient Components Developer's Guide (second edition)

Semantic Services

A friend from IBM just sent two links through to me for some Ontology and semantic based work IBM has on their Alphaworks site.

Ontology-based Web Services for Business Integration
A semantic Web services proof-of-concept demonstration for the industrial sector that shows service discovery, composition, and business process transformation.

Semantic Tools for Web Services
A set of Eclipse plug-ins for semantic matching and composition of Web services. (This is an ETTK technology.)

Links:
Ontology-based Web Services
Semantic Tools for Web Services
IBM Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK)

FacesClient

One of the big problems with developing web application is creating good interactivity for the user without having to refresh the page. Using multiple technologies like AJAX it is possible to enhance this interaction but the work required for developers to achieve this is great. Therefore using the Model View Controller (MVC) concepts from Java Server Faces the FacesClient has been developed. IBM has an implementation of this JavaScript library and components and is available from their AlphaWorks site in the Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK). If you would like to just have a read then below is a link to the FacesClient developer guide.

Links
Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK)
Faces for Laszlo
FacesClient Components, Part 1 : Portlet Programming with FacesClient Components
FacesClient Components Developer's Guide (second edition)

OASIS drafts Blueprints for SOA

OASIS has started a new Technical working group to start defining Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) blueprints to facilitate applications being developed or re-factored into platform-agnostic services. The key players are all the same crowd, including BEA, Microsoft, IBM, Adobe Systems, Datapower, Infravio and Software AG. The catalyst documents being used are the blueprints originally developed by The Middleware Company analyst firm who sold the documents to a former employee for $1 as long as they were further developed and released license-free to the world developer community.

Links
SOA Center Service Oriented Architecture Blueprints
OASIS Web Services and SOA Technical Committees List
OASIS Adoption Blueprints TC

Wiki in a Browser Page

I find wiki's a really cool idea. If you are not familiar with them they are essentially a way of creating web pages using a very simple markup language, so simple that anyone can edit a wiki page, even if you know nothing about HTML. The whole idea behind wiki's is to make it easier for people to create and edit web pages. The other benefit of wikis that creating links between pages is all based on creating a wiki link with the name of the new page, that is it. Well now on the meat of this article, enter GTDTiddlyWiki. GTDTiddlyWiki is an implementation of TiddlyWiki that allows you to create and edit a web page that is stored completely in your browser. Yes that is right none of the information is stored on the server, which allows you to edit a TiddlyWiki page even without a connection to a server. In fact it does not work by connecting to a server at all. TiddlyWiki works by using CSS and Javascript to save and manipulate the page contents and then save them in the file for future reference. The GTDTiddlyWiki implements the “Getting Things Done” concept a personal productivity method by David Allen. Have a go for yourself.

Links
GTD Tiddlywiki
TiddlyWiki
Getting Things Done Book

XQuery and Web Services

My report developed in conjunction with Andrew Barrow has finally been published as a DSTO report. The report outlines an approach to use XQuery in Web Service request to reduce the amount of traffic (data sizes) when web services have to respond with large XML documents and the client is only interested in small sections.

Links
DSTO XQuery Report

Javascript and PHP

There has been lots of fuss about using Javascript and the XMLHTTPRequest object to communicate between the server and browser page. This communication method allows web pages to get extra data or communicate with the server quicker than refreshing the whole page just to retrieve a small amount of data. JPSPAN is an api to easily connect JavaScript with PHP scripts, have a look here.

Links
JPSPAN Home Page

xNAL: Name and Address Standard

I really do think that the number of XML standards out there is completely overwhelming, but on the other hand extremely relevant and required. Although I would like to see a little more convergence between some of the similar standards. xNAL is a OASIS developed standard that is to define the data requirements for address and naming information.

xNal is broken up into two standards:

• xNL: Name language
• xAL: Address language

Links
xNAL Report on OASIS Cover Pages

XForms Beta Release

Mozilla Foundation has announced the beta release of XForms 1.0 Recommendation. XForms is a new XML standard being developed by the members of the Mozilla Foundation to define web forms that are mode extensible and greater functionality than the current HTML forms.

Links

XForms 1.0 Beta Press Release
Mozilla XForms Home Page
W3C XForms 1.0 Recommendation
W3C XForms Test Suite

JSON: JavaScript Object Notation - Lightweight Data Inter-change Format

I have been given a link to JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), which is a project to create a data interchange format that is as language independent as XML but not as heavy in the bandwidth and parsing requirements. JSON is based on the JavaScript Programming Language and has bindings in the following programming languages:

• C
• C#
• Java
• JavaScript
• Objective CAML
• PHP
• ML
• Ruby

Here is a sample JSON message:

{
"glossary": {
"title": "example glossary",
"GlossDiv": {
"title": "S",
"GlossList": [{
"ID": "SGML",
"SortAs": "SGML",
"GlossTerm": "Standard Generalized Markup Language",
"Acronym": "SGML",
"Abbrev": "ISO 8879:1986",
"GlossDef": "A meta-markup language, used to create markup languages such as DocBook.",
"GlossSeeAlso": ["GML", "XML", "markup"]}]}}}

The same text expressed as XML:

<!DOCTYPE glossary PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V3.1//EN">
<glossary><title>example glossary</title>
<GlossDiv><title>S</title>
<GlossList>
<GlossEntry ID="SGML" SortAs="SGML">
<GlossTerm>Standard Generalized Markup Language</GlossTerm>
<Acronym>SGML</Acronym>
<Abbrev>ISO 8879:1986</Abbrev>
<GlossDef>
<para>A meta-markup language, used to create markup languages such as DocBook.</para>
<GlossSeeAlso OtherTerm="GML">
<GlossSeeAlso OtherTerm="XML">
</GlossDef>
<GlossSee OtherTerm="markup">
</GlossEntry>
...
</GlossList>
</GlossDiv>
</glossary>

Links
JSON Home Page

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

BPMI to Start Work on BPXL

BPMI.org is planning a Think Tank meeting in Miami on March 1st 2005 to talk about the future of BPEL. BPMI is planning to start work on a new standard called Business Process eXtension Layers (BPXL) that will help exchange information between process modeling tools and process management engines.

The original BPEL standard was developed through a OASIS Technical Committee. However BPMI see that this process would be too slow to develop the new standards and are therefore endeavoring to manage the new standards development themselves outside the confines of OASIS.

Links
Computer Business Review Article
BPMI.org
BPMI Think Tank Announcement

PeopleSoft Support WSRP

PeopleSoft recently demonstrated their PeopleSoft Community Portal and PeopleSoft applications interoperate with other portal implementations using Web Service for Remote Portlets (WSRP).

Links
PeopleSoft Support WSRP Article
OASIS Web Services for Remote Portlets Technical Committee (WSRP TC)
WSRP 1.0 Standard

WS-Reliability 1.1 Standard Approved

OASIS has announced that their WS-Reliability 1.1 standard for reliable messaging using web services has been approved by is members as an OASIS Standard. Here is a description of WS-Reliability 1.1 from the standard document itself:

“WS-Reliability is a SOAP-based ([SOAP 1.1] and [SOAP 1.2 Part 1]) specification that fulfills reliable messaging requirements critical to some applications of Web Services. SOAP over HTTP [RFC2616] is not sufficient when an application-level messaging protocol must also guarantee some level of reliability and security. This specification defines reliability in the context of current Web Services standards. This specification has been designed for use in combination with other complementary protocols (see Section 1.4) and builds on previous experiences (e.g., ebXML Message Service [ebMS].)”

See the links below to read more about WS-Reliability or to download the standard and associated schema files.

Links
WS-Reliability Article
WS-Reliability 1.1 Standard
OASIS Web Services Reliable Messaging Technical Committee (WSRM TM)

Metadata: Dublin Core Metadata Initiative

Metadata is poorly used on the Internet and most intranets to describe objects (normally web pages). I have used and accessed metadata for numerous implementations and systems, and have come across elements that contained the name “DC” before an element like “title” or “description” and have never really thought about what it was for or what it stood for. While researching information about a recent article about DITA I found a reference to the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI). The DCMI is trying to provide better metadata standards for ALL resources that are interoperable. This means the “DC” actually stands for “Dublin Core” and means that the element conforms to the Dublin Core standard. For a complete Dublin Core Definition see the following example for the Dublin Core home page:

<?xml version=“1.0”?>
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf=“http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#” xmlns:dc=“http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”>
<rdf:Description rdf:about=“http://dublincore.org/”>
<dc:title>Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) Home Page</dc:title>
<dc:description>The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is an open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models. DCMI's activities include consensus-driven working groups, global conferences and workshops, standards liaison, and educational efforts to promote widespread acceptance of metadata standards and practices.</dc:description>
<dc:date>2004-10-05</dc:date>
<dc:format>text/html</dc:format>
<dc:language>en</dc:language>
<dc:contributor>Dublin Core Metadata Initiative</dc:contributor>
</rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

This example is an XML/RDF instantiation of the Dublin Core definition. As you can see Dublin Core defines the “Description”, “Date”, “Format”, etc. elements that describe the contents of the document. By using this worldwide accepted standard you can describe a document so that any search engine, Internet spider or content management system can use this metadata.

Defining metadata using Dublin Core is really only one part of the problem, the other problem is that the systems still do not “understand” the meaning of the data defined in the metadata. This understanding is where the concepts behind the semantic web can be applied, although the semantic web concept is still developing therefore is not quite ready for prime time use.

Links
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Website
DCMI Documentation

“Rich” Web Clients

I am a keen advocate for “Rich” internet clients. By “Rich” I do not mean Java Applets, but web pages that provide a more complete user experience without having to request new pages from the server whenever the user clicks a button or link. There are few different approaches that provide this type of functionality including XUL (Mozilla Platform), Macromedia Flex and traditional JavaScript and DOM. Many web developers do not exploit the powerful capabilities provided with JavaScript and DOM. A recent example of this type of “Rich” client is Google's new Gmail capability that uses JavaScript and DOM to create a very quick and snappy user interface. By using JavaScript Google has been able to only send the basic requests and data transfers rather sending whole page changes back to the client. This of course takes quite a lot more client-side JavaScript development but does create a very powerful user interface. If you are interested in more information about the Gmail Agent API have a look here.

The Mozilla Platform is a more developer friendly approach as you define your application's interface in XUL and then link it together with JavaScript. However this approach requires your users to use a Mozilla-based browser (Mozilla or Firefox).

For the most interactive “Rich” client experience that will work on any browser Macromedia Flex is your product. Flex is based around a similar concept of Mozilla by defining your interface using XML documents and then linking it together with a scripting languages (Macromedia ActionScript). The difference is that Flex's client is built inside the Macromedia Flash player (available on almost every platform and browser), which allows for highly dynamic and pretty user interfaces. Flex is deployed using a J2EE server and can communicate back to the server by making Web Service calls or exchanging Java objects.

Gmail's approach works on all browsers but is technically much harder to implement. Mozilla's approach works well but requires a Mozilla-based browser. Macromedia's approach provides the best of both worlds but is not free and requires extensive server support. So if you are a web application developer please consider one of these options and provide a more advanced experience for your users.

Links
Mozilla Web Site
Firefox Site
Gmail Agent API Article
Macromedia Flex 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

Enterprise Agility: ESB, SOA, Web Services

Web Services Pipeline has another great article about web services by Fred Cummins. This article talks about enterprise agility and how Enterprise Services Bus (ESB), Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Web Services can help create an agile organisation. The article is a must read for anyone interested in the way web services are heading as it identifies a good list of requirements to support an Agile environment, or really any large web services deployment. The article also goes onto to concisely identify the middleware requirements and the components that create a complete enterprise service environment.

Links
Web Services Pipeline Article

Apache Pluto 1.0.1-rc1 Released

The Apache guys have released a release candidate of Apache Pluto. Pluto is an implementation of the JSR-168 specification that defines an API to be used for the development of portlets to be deployed into a complete Portal implementation. Before JSR-168 each of the portal implementers had the own methods to develop portlets and provide access to personalisation and presentation features. Pluto is not a complete Portal implementation but it does provide the APIs required for the portlet development.

Links
Pluto Home Page

Web Services vs REST

Jim Webber has a great article on WebServices.org about Web Services and REST and that these two architectures are converging. REST is all about defining a set of uniform APIs for accessing and manipulating data over HTTP, while Web Services is about the use of SOAP, WSDL and UDDI to allow for system communication. Jim Webber argues that originally Web Services was just the extension of similar technologies like CORBA but now it is evolving and allowing for more REST-like architectures that are more open and loosely coupled. If you are interested in web services and the direction they are heading then this article is a very good read.

Links
REST in Peach? - Article by Jim Webber
WebServices.org Site

WSRP 1.0 Primer Released

I know I have not blogged much lately about the web service standards but I have been pretty busy at work so have not wanted to do research in this area at home. However one important document has been released by OASIS about Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP).

“Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) is a web services protocol for aggregating content and interactive web applications from remote sources.” - WSRP 1.0 Primer

This document is a primer to describing the concepts and implementation behind the WSRP standard for users who want to learn how to use this standard. The document is a public release and the WSRP team is requesting comments by the 14th October 2004.

Links
WSRP Primer 1.0 (PDF)
OASIS WSRP Technical Committee Page

FOAF: Friend Of A Friend Vocabulary

The Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) project is aiming at creating a language that uses both XML and RDF to define a language that can describe the relationships between people and resources in a machine readable format. This works by individuals defining their own FOAF definitions and the exposing the URL of this FOAF file so that others can access and use the data. Exposing the FOAF files allows for a FOAF aggregator to consume multiple FOAF files from multiple individuals and by merging the data can define a complete community of interest.

For a basic description of how FOAF works have a read of Edd Dumbill's article on the IBM DeveloperWorks site. For more detail go to the FOAF home page.

Links:
FOAF home page
DeveloperWorks Introduction to FOAF article

CSS Tabs

Unraveled.com has a nice and simple article about creating page tabs by only using CSS, which also works in many different browsers

Links
CSS Tabs Article

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

Web Standards coming to a desktop near you.

Web Standards like JavaScript, DOM, HTML, CSS, XML are starting to become more common place in desktop applications. Mozilla already uses XML to define its GUI using their XUL markup language and then use JavaScript as the glue. Apple has also previewed their new Dashboard capability that will allow developers to create widgets that are quickly displayed or hidden by entering a hotkey shortcut. These new capabilities are becoming more and more prolific and signifies a paradigm shift of using these standards in desktop-based application development rather than relegating their use in web based applications using standard client-server architectural designs.

The reason that these standards are becoming more prolific for desktop applications is because of their flexibility, ease of use and platform independence. As more and more applications are becoming network enabled it is a logical step for these web-based applications to be run directly on the desktop. These standards are also very powerful and could be used to develop applications that run both as web-based applications accessed by a standard Internet browser or as fully fledged desktop applications.

The common uses for these standards include:
- Use of XML to define and build GUI components
- Using javascript and other scripting languages as the runtime glue to build the application
- providing lightweight user interfaces that provide a quick access to information that can also be skinned so that users can select the overall look and feel of their application.

I foresee that over the next couple of years you will see a greater number of these localised web applications appearing that support and use web-based standards to provide standalone or network centric applications.

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