BPMN: An SOA Etch-A-Sketch without BPEL?
One of the reasons I really enjoy working with application development software so much is the vitality of the online community. My recent post reacting to what I perceived as a dismissal of BPEL4People generated both responses and traffic for this, our brand spankin’ new blog. Unlike other technology areas, app dev — and the SOA world in particular — is full of well-thought-through blogs and fascinating personalities. I appreciate readers who have taken the time to find us and who are interested in what we have to say.
And, as the newbie in this universe, I seem to have stepped into the middle of a BPMN versus BPEL discussion. My post was perceived by some as exactly that: one should pick BPEL or BPMN. It felt like I got into a religious war, with competing accolytes for each side doing that shout-over-the-wall-at-the-other-side thing.
I want to make sure we are clear about how we view BPEL and BPMN. Over this last weekend, I had an email discussion with Mark Taber, our CEO, which I’d like to paraphrase to make sure everyone understands what we think is important for customers who are trying to orchestrate services that include human tasks. In short,
- We understand people are adopting BPMN. It’s a standard…and our company is all about standards.
- Today, BPMN is being used mostly for notation..that’s OK, but unless it’s executable it’s not any more relevant to writing an application than Visio is.
- If you want you BPMN notations to be executable, today that means buying proprietary execution stacks, which lock up your business process logic better than a life sentence at Guantanamo Bay.
- BPMN is only going to be useful when you can output it to a standardized, open and executable language. Guess what: we think that’s BPEL.
So, far from dissin’ BPMN, we think it’s got it’s legs…but the legs are built of BPEL.
As a kid, I was fascinated by Etch-a-Sketch toys. But I gave it up when I realized that after hours and hours and hours of drawing, my artwork (if you could call it that) was locked into the toy. I couldn’t change it easily and one simple shake would destroy the entire picture. That analogy holds perfectly for BPMN without BPEL: you can etch-a-sketch all your business processes with it, but if you want to run it, the BPMN ends up inside some vendor’s proprietary execution stack.
What standards-based SOA implementation wants that?
