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Article: An introduction to Apache ODE

Posted by Stefan Tilkov on Sep 05, 2007 02:56 AM

Community
SOA
Topics
Business Process Management
Tags
WS-BPEL,
Apache ODE,
BPEL,
WS-Star
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.

6 comments

Reply

Wrong URL by Odd Christer Brovig Posted Sep 5, 2007 5:35 AM
Re: Wrong URL by Stefan Tilkov Posted Sep 5, 2007 6:02 AM
Who's using ODE by Casper Dino Posted Sep 5, 2007 7:15 AM
Re: Who's using ODE by Matthieu Riou Posted Sep 5, 2007 8:50 AM
Good article by Kristoffer Sjögren Posted Sep 8, 2007 8:38 AM
"close" operation doesn't listed in bindings by brain debugger Posted May 9, 2008 11:32 AM
  1. Back to top

    Wrong URL

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

    The url to the article is wrong.

  2. Back to top

    Re: Wrong URL

    Sep 5, 2007 6:02 AM by Stefan Tilkov

    Thanks - fixed.

  3. Back to top

    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

  4. Back to top

    Re: Who's using ODE

    Sep 5, 2007 8:50 AM by Matthieu Riou

    Dino, there's a very early list here: http://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.

  5. Back to top

    Good article

    Sep 8, 2007 8:38 AM by Kristoffer Sjögren

    Hey, good article!

  6. Back to top

    "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. Also "while" block for "close" doesn't have statement, don't know if it is ok, though. Regards, Bugger

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