In this interview Alec Sharp, an expert on modeling, discusses the importance of modeling, particularly Business Process Modeling and BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) to app development. Sharp says that although building complex models can be contradictory to what Agile is about, building simple models is not. Sharp also refers to BPMN as a “visual programming language.”
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced that the first generation objects of their WF technology are being deprecated in the upcoming .NET 4.5 release. WF, which is a workflow engine leveraged by .NET developers as well as a handful of Microsoft server products, has multiple new capabilities in .NET 4.5 while officially putting application that leverage the old .NET 3.0 objects on notice.
Windows Workflow Foundation 4.5 is the first major update to the library since WF4 was released in early 2010. It includes C# expressions, versioning support, and improvements for better management of large workflows.
In a new article, Boris Lublinsky discusses how the JBoss middleware platform, specifically JBoss ESB and jBPM (JBoss Business Process Management) can be used to integrate both internal and third-party services to deliver composite services and content in customer-specific forms, including Web services, WAP, portals, and more.
In this interview we talk with representatives of the BPMN 2.0 standardization effort from Oracle, IBM and SAP. Here they discuss the evolution of BPMN as well as how it relates to other efforts such as XPDL, WS-BPEL and BPEL4People.
Bill Burke shows how to use REST to create interfaces to middleware services – messaging, transactions, workflow, security – in order to have RESTful enterprise SOA implementations, and what are the limitations of REST.
Cesare Pautasso proves that BPM can be used to compose and implement REST web services, showing the relationship between business processes and stateful resources accessed through a RESTful API.
Workflow Foundation is a new workflow engine from Microsoft. Microsoft is embedding Worfklow Foundation in many of its products like Office 2007, Windows Vista and soon Biztalk itself. Matt Winkler, Microsoft Technical Evangelist, walks through the story of Workflow Foundation, when to use it and the futures planned in the next version.
Keith Donald goes in depth on Spring Web Flow, which solves the problem of orchestrating control navigations within a web application in Spring MVC, Struts, and JSF. Keith talks about how to design workflows in web apps and technical details such as how the flows are fault tolerant and how they integrate into web frameworks.
