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In another "virtual panel session", we took the opportunity to talk with representatives of the new OASIS BPEL4People Technical Committee and get their feedback on just why we need this work. Apart from asking them what BPEL4People (and WS-HumanTask) are all about, we asked them how this relates to other BPMN efforts and what else we can expect in this area.
Although OMG is not scheduled to get to BPMN 2.0 until August/September timeframe, the initial announcements about its possible directions have caused a lot of activities on the Web.
In his last blog post, Johan den Haan asks one of the key questions of model driven engineering. The article is didactic and explains how ontological and linguistic metamodels can be combined (orthogonally) to simplify code generation while enabling the combination of general purpose languages and domain specific languages concepts. He uses BPEL and BPMN as a supporting example.
BPMN's adoption is increasing rapidly. In this post, we review some recent activity such as the publication of BPMN 1.1 by the OMG, a tutorial on how to use the Eclipse SOA Tools Platform to "Execute Business Processes" and a comprehensive 120 minute tutorial on BPMN by Bruce Silver.
In the past couple of weeks, two major reports on "The State of BPM in 2008" were published by BPTrends and BEA. The reports show a fast growing market lead by major SOA infrastructure vendors, a significant growth of the adoption of BPMN and a steady growth of BPEL. Drivers for adopting a BPM approach range from cost savings to compensating for missing functionality in enterprise applications.
Tom Baeyens wrote a summary of the state of Workflow & BPM standards and tools. After a detailed look at BPEL, BPMN, and other technologies such as choreography, XPDL, BPDM, jPDL, Tom takes the stance that it is time to abandon the idea that non-technical business analysts can draw production-ready software in diagrams and separate the analysis process models and executable process models.
In a new InfoQ article, Jean-Jacques Dubray explores a new architecture blueprint for BPMSs that offers a cleaner alignment between SOA and BPM. Jean-Jacques argues that after more than eight years of intense research, we are still far from having the ability to use the business process models designed by business analysts to create complete executable solutions.
In a new InfoQ minibook, InfoQ SOA Editor and SOA Enterprise Architect Jean-Jacques Dubray describes the state of the art and emerging new approaches in building "Composite Software", solutions created by assembling existing services. The book is available as an InfoQ Minibook, i.e. free of charge in PDF format for InfoQ users. A printed version is available too.
Intalio last week released their open source based BPM System - Intalio|BPMS 5.0, including amongst other things a BPMN Editor and a BPEL server engine. The release is a milestone for Intalio in their effort to realise a complete solution for their BPM 2.0 vision. InfoQ took the opportunity to interview Ismael Ghalimi, Intalio CEO, and Arnaud Blandin, EMEA Director, about the new release.
Composite Software offers a new level of granularity when compared to SaaS (Software as a Service). Composite Software is about enabling "right-sourcing", i.e. move (or keep) arbitrary small or large elements of functionality wherever it is the most cost effective to operate them, not just entire systems. Economically, "right-sourcing" is far more efficient than "outsourcing" and SaaS. The goal of this book is start by understanding today’s software construction processes and technologies and explore why and how it should be evolved to support core composition mechanisms.
