Article: An introduction to Apache ODE

Posted by Stefan Tilkov on Sep 05, 2007

Community

SOA

Topics

Business Process Management

Tags

WS-Star ,

Apache ODE ,

WS-BPEL ,

BPEL

In this new InfoQ article, Paul Brown introduces Apache ODE, an open source implementation of the WS-BPEL 2.0 standard. ODE recently graduated from incubation to an Apache top-level project, and the first release since leaving incubation is now available. According to Paul, ODE differs from other BPEL engines in that it is delivered as a component rather than a framework for developers looking to add orchestration functionality to their systems.

After providing some background on WS-BPEL's long history, Paul introduces ODE's features by showing how to deploy and execute a simple process. The article includes step-by-step instructions on how to install and deploy the ODE runtime into a Jetty Web container, as well as how to deploy a very simple application created as a BPEL process into ODE. Apache Axis2's direct HTTP binding is then used to access the running process via HTTP issued via the curl command line tool.

The article is remarkably free of high-level buzzwords; as the author writes in the introduction,

The ODE philosophy on BPEL is that it is a language for describing how to implement a set of message-based communication capabilities in terms of state manipulation and messages exchanged with external services. Other than in this sentence and in the preceding paragraph, the word "business" will not appear, and there will be no talk of alignment with IT or other silliness — ODE is guilt-free (and gilt-free) technology like a web server or a database; what you do with it is up to you. No GUI, IDE, ESB, or other TLA (other than a little XML) is required.

Read the full article to find out whether it lives up to Paul's promise.

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   Wrong URL

   Sep 5, 2007 5:35 AM by Odd Christer Brovig

   The url to the article is wrong.

   Reply

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   Re: Wrong URL

   Sep 5, 2007 6:02 AM by Stefan Tilkov

   Thanks - fixed.

   Reply

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   Who's using ODE

   Sep 5, 2007 7:15 AM by Casper Dino

   Any public list of projects using this engine in their solutions?
   
   /Dino

   Reply

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   Re: Who's using ODE

   Sep 5, 2007 8:50 AM by Matthieu Riou

   Dino, there's a very early list here:
   
   ode.apache.org/links.html
   
   However from the questions asked on our user and dev mailing lists I can tell you there's quite a few others. We just haven't asked people if we could list their projects there yet.

   Reply

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   Good article

   Sep 8, 2007 8:38 AM by Kristoffer Sjögren

   Hey, good article!

   Reply

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   "close" operation doesn't listed in bindings

   May 9, 2008 11:32 AM by brain debugger

   Hi! Nice article.
   
   Looks like the the "close" operation is missing in bindings.
   Following should be added after "init" operation.
   
   <wsdl:operation name="close">
   <soap:operation soapAction="" style="rpc"/>
   <wsdl:input>
   <soap:body namespace="http://example.com/bpel/counter" use="literal"/>
   </wsdlinput>
   <wsdl:output>
   <soap:body namespace="http://example.com/bpel/counter" use="literal"/>
   </wsdloutput>
   </wsdloperation>
   
   Also "while" block for "close" doesn't have <condition> statement, don't know if it is ok, though.
   
   Regards,
   Bugger</condition></wsdl:output></wsdl:input></wsdl:operation>

   Reply

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