Feast your eyes on the first public screenshot of ActiveVOS 6.0
August 7th, 2008 by Alex Neihaus
I am very pleased to be able to post the first public screenshot of the Designer in our upcoming ActiveVOS 6.0 product. Click on the thumbnail above to see the image full size.
Those of you who knew us for ActiveBPEL, the world’s leading Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) engine, will be delighted to discover that BPEL remains at the core of ActiveVOS 6.0. All of our BPEL execution engine’s virtues — a superior visual design environment, rigorous adherence to the BPEL 2.0 specification, process versioning, the world’s first implementation of BPEL4People, remote testing and debugging, dynamic switching of endpoints on failure, clustering and failover — remain as you’ve known them. And there are some truly magical new enhancements, like support for POJO’s that turns old Java applications into web services with a few clicks of a mouse. Clearly, on the BPEL engine feature list, what few competitive lights there were in the rear view mirror grow far dimmer in ActiveVOS 6.0. (Message to Oracle BPEL Process Manager users: it’s about time to get to a real implementation of BPEL 2.0, don’t you think?)
But ActiveVOS is no longer just a BPEL engine. We are, truly, a VOS or visual orchestration system. BPEL is, in part, how we accomplish services-based applications. But it’s no longer what ActiveVOS is. Consider this partial list of new capabilities that will be included in ActiveVOS 6.0 and you’ll see why nothing else — not “open source” arrivistes like Inalio or the stack oligarchy of SAP, IBM and Oracle can compete.
- ActiveVOS 6.0 implements a spectacular Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) capability. Now, business analysts can design processes and transform them into executable BPEL at the click of a mouse. Wait until you see it. It’s just astonishing.
- ActiveVOS 6.0 contains a complete complex event processing engine (CEP). One of the things that our BPEL engine has always done is emit the events needed to produce CEP applications. But now, for the first time, these two capabilities are combined in a single product. That means developers never have to integrate things themselves…they simply take advantage of it. CEP in ActiveVOS 6.0 is specified at process deployment time, eliminating the need to code CEP into the process itself and making it easy to add CEP to deployed processes.
- Killer new reporting, BAM and BI capabilities. I don’t have screenshots from development for these yet, but these will not only win the eye-candy wars, [update: after they saw this post, guess what? I received a great screenshot of our new console] they’ll actually make it a snap for businesses to easily understand the overall state of the enterprise.
With these and other new features, we believe that the age of the visual orchestration system has begun. Now, when developers are considering how to do services-based applications, the choice couldn’t be more clear. You can do what the stack oligarchy wants: buy a bunch of indigestible piece parts and engineer the equivalent of a VOS in your shop before you can even hope to begin writing applications. Or, you can use the all-in-one, standards-based capabilities of ActiveVOS 6.0 and get done better and faster.
ActiveVOS 6.0 will be generally available in a few weeks.
