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Fastenal Corp. uses ActiveVOS to implement SOA

Selected from hundreds of entries, the three winners were chosen based on creativity, thoroughness and quality of work:

1st place: Brian Carey, President, Simple Empowerment of BPMS, Inc. (client project: Perot Systems)

2nd place: Ervin Nemesszeghy, Software Architect/Java EE Developer, Hardcomsoft

3rd place: Karl Geppert, CTO, Chemwatch

Wanna win some cool prizes?  Enter our current contest BPM in a Bottle for your chance to win either a T-Mobile® G1™ smart phone with Google™ or a Logitech® Squeezebox™ Boom network music player. Contest ends March 27 so don’t delay!

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Congratulations to the “Bring SOA Home for the Holidays” contest winners

Read all the details in the press release attached to this post. Enter at www.absolutebpm.com — and good luck!

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Active Endpoints announces “BPM in a Bottle Contest”

Last week, Active Endpoints’ Michael Rowley participated in the quarterly face-to-face meeting of the OASIS Technical Committee working on the BPEL4People and WS-Human Task specifications. In this very engaging podcast, Rowley describes the inner workings of TC’s (something you usually don’t hear much about), describes the work the TC has recently accomplished and articulates the grand vision for business process management (BPM) and workflow that the committee has been working  on.

If you’ve been wondering about the state of standards-based BPM and workflow systems or, frankly, if you think BPEL and BPEL4People have dropped out of sight, I strongly encourage you to listen to this podcast. You’ll hear how some the of most important thought-leaders in the IT world, including IBM, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, TIBCO and, of course, Active Endpoints, are working towards a BPM world in which standardized systems make it possible to implement business processes in ways we haven’t been able to reach as yet.

We hope you enjoy this look at BPM today and in the future.

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VOSibilities podcast #27 An Update on the BPEL4People & WS-Human Task Standards

As Paul puts it “Do yourself a favor and check out this great visual orchestration system.” If you have not yet considered ActiveVOS to orchestrate your SOA based applications, make it one of your New Year’s resolutions.

One week left to enter our Bring SOA Home for the Holidays contest! Download ActiveVOS and submit your good ideas. You could win a very, very cool Lenovo netbook.

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Product review: “ActiveVOS 6.0 is a game changer”

Please, not yet another loan application demo!  Far from that. We wanted to do something totally different that visitors to the site could grok quickly by first viewing a Camtasia presentation; that could then be experienced online through a hosted version of the demo; and for the tinkerers at heart, that could be taken apart to learn how it was all built using ActiveVOS.

What better than a “Classic Car Restoration” scenario to demonstrate how, with ActiveVOS, you can model, implement, test and deploy a service orchestration which incorporates human task; Java and web service orchestration, task and process management; activity monitoring and reporting; complex event processing (CEP); and a whole lot more.

We set out to automate the estimate process for Vintage Old Stock, a classic car restoration shop. Play an eight-minute demo to get the feel of the estimate process. Then look under the hood and see how we used ActiveVOS Designer to model and document the estimate process; how we designed and implemented the process; how we simulated and tested it; and how we deployed the process. And don’t stop there! See how ActiveVOS leverages CEP and how, through the ActiveVOS Console , you have complete visibility into your processes and tasks.

I don’t like being just a passenger. If you’re like me, you’ll want to test drive the demo for yourself and take it for a spin. Before you head out, read the Owner’s Manual. Take the demo for a lap by requesting an estimate. Act as the estimator and generate an estimate. Look under the hood to see the process in action. User info can be found in the Owner’s Manual.

We’ve also made available to tinkerers the ActiveVOS Orchestration Project and a fully configured demo environment. For those already using ActiveVOS Designer, download the Vintage Old Stock Orchestration Project files here. If you want to work with the pre-configured demo environment locally, download it here. Enjoy the drive!

Cheers and Happy Holidays,
Luc

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Not your dad’s loan application demo

‘Twas the night before New Year’s and all through the house
Not a process was broken, not even a browse.

The ActiveVOS users sat by their computers with anticipation
In hopes that the “Bring SOA Home for the Holidays” judges would like their contest submission.

When out in the judges’ office there arose such a clatter
Every Active Endpoints employee wondered what was the matter.

And what to their wondering eyes should appear
But the judges with the list of three lucky winners of some really cool Lenovo gear!

—————————————————————————————————–

I hope you enjoyed reading this little parody of “The Night Before Christmas” as much as I enjoyed writing it. Seriously, we have some good news. Because of the great response to our contest “Bring SOA Home for the Holidays,” we have extended the submission deadline to New Year’s Eve – December 31, 11:59pm.

It’s easy and fun! Download a supported 30-day trial of ActiveVOS, the world’s leading visual orchestration system, and tell us how you would use it in your SOA, BPM, BPEL or BPMN projects. Make this holiday season a winner for you and your company. Try ActiveVOS…win a Lenovo netbook! Visit www.soaholiday.com for details and contest rules.

Happy Holidays!

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“Bring SOA Home for the Holidays” contest extended to 12/31

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Active Endpoints Joins Web Services Test Forum

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SearchSOA.com: ActiveVOS “…is beginning to show dividends”

In this podcast episode, I talk with Active Endpoints’ UK partner and T-Impact CEO Keith Stagner about T-Impact’s approach to helping clients achieve rapid ROI via improved applications with SOA-based BPM applications.

I hope you enjoy hearing about how SOA is being used in the UK, what UK customers are looking for in their BPM applications and why T-Impact is succeeding even in these tough economic times.

(And, oh yes, there’s a commercial for ActiveVOS in the podcast. But a) I can be forgiven for doing one since that’s my job and b) it’s in the context of Keith’s discussion of how T-Impact uses ActiveVOS to meet his organization’s strict objectives for client ROI in their SOA projects.)

As always, we’d love to know what you think. Comments here or email to me are more than welcome.

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VOSibilities podcast #23: An Interview with T-Impact CEO Keith Stagner

We have a long list of product vignettes planned, but we wanted to start the series off with a bang: a demonstration of how Java developers can use POJO’s — or plain old Java objects — directly in an ActiveVOS orchestration. We introduced this in ActiveVOS 6.0 and we know from the response we’ve been getting that Java developers have been looking for something exactly like this to bridge their current object-oriented development world and the new world of SOA-based BPM applications.

So, we hope you enjoy this little vignette and we hope to hear from you about what you’d like us to demo in the future.

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VOSibilities podcast #22: Creating SOA applications using Java and POJO’s

We are proud to be able to help Fastenal achieve its objectives and thank them for allowing us to tell this story.

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Fastenal Succeeds with ActiveVOS for its SOA applications

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to review a new book on creating SOA-based applications. I was surprised to be invited to review a technical book because I am pretty lightweight technically. But I was also pleased that this blog has attracted enough readership so that the publisher thought a mention here could help get the word out about this new book.

Despite my trepidation that reading the book would tax my understanding of the technology (after all, I am a marketing guy, not a developer), I found reading Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL  (Matjaz Juric and Kapil Pant, 305 pages, Packt Publishing, August 2008, $59.99) surprisingly easy.

Still, to be very honest much of the technical discussion was lost on me. To my novice eye, the book is well organized and well presented. The initial chapter presents an excellent argument for developing SOA applications; later chapters move progressively from conceptual modeling to BPMN and then into the deployment of processes using BPEL.

My only regret is that the authors were forced to (I hope they didn’t want to) use the Oracle stack of products to illustrate many of the actual implementation considerations, especially when describing BPEL. Naturally, it hurts me to read all about a competitor’s product, especially when we believe ActiveVOS 6.0’s BPMN-to-BPEL integration is far easier to use and implement. Had the authors used the ActiveVOS visual orchestration system, they could have eliminated pages of Oracle product names descriptions and “when to use what” recommendations.  Maybe the authors will consider changing for the next edition of the book.

But as I read the book, it occurred to me that my surface understanding of the technology actually made it easier for me to see the “theology” inherent in the BPMN and BPEL debate we so often hear about. Consider this passage:

The fundamental difference between BPMN and BPEL is also the reason why some tools have started providing extensible features…to allow a round-trip feedback loop between the business process users working in BPMN and technical teams developing in BPEL…This is a topic of debate, as we are asking our business community to think like a programmer and model business processes to create consistent technical output in the form of BPEL, which is unfair.

Here, the authors have the exposed the fundamental issue for creating SOA-based BPM applications: should the top-down, business-analyst creates-a-model-for-everything, BPMN view of work reign supreme? Or should the structured, execution-oriented BPEL approach to automation be ascendant?

My answer? It depends. If you are in a company in which the objective is 100% transparency of processes, in which people are told what to do and how to do it, in which creativity flows from the BPMN diagram, your approach is clear…and doubleplusgood. (And, yes, I have an opinion.)

OTOH, if you believe that computers are tools for people, that it’s better to let machines do the repetitive parts of a process while easily including less-structured human tasks, you have the choice of a different approach using BPEL and BPMN. And I think the choice has a lot to do with your company’s cultural ethos.

Still, what’s nice about these standards is even though they’ve been put together in a shotgun wedding and the marriage is far from comfortable, the union of these two technologies gives users ultimate flexibility to implement SOA applications as they prefer. And as a book to illustrate how to implement these choices, you can’t go wrong with Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL (as long as you don’t use Oracle stuff to do it).

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A great SOA read..just wish they’d used ActiveVOS 6.0

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searchSOA: ActiveVOS 6.0 “…matures SOA..”

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SD Times: “ActiveVOS 6.0 gains BPMN for adjusting workflows”

Vance McCarthy of Integration Developer News has posted a very interesting podcast with Active Endpoints’ Director of Strategy and Technology, Michael Rowley. Vance discusses with Michael what the concept of a visual orcehstration system is, the standards we have implemented in ActiveVOS 6.0, and how an integrated system accelerates developement of SOA-based applications.

The podcast can be accessed here.

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Integration Developer News podcast with AE’s Michael Rowley on ActiveVOS 6.0, SOA and BPM

In this podcast, I talk with Luc Clement, our Sr. Director of Product Management for the “inside story” on the development of ActiveVOS 6.0 and the features we think make it so important and unique. You’ll hear Luc and me discuss our thinking behind the new features and improvements we made in our visual orchestration system. We hope you enjoy this podcast.

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VOSibilities podcast #16: Luc Clement on ActiveVOS 6.0

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Active Endpoints Announces ActiveVOS 6.0

…does it matter that it’s not “BPM, BAM, BRE, BRMS or SOA?”

That question popped into my head as I read what Tim Bass has to say on this topic because, as I hope everyone knows, we’ve just released ActiveVOS 6.0 (watch a demo here and get a free trial). ActiveVOS 6.0 is the first product to contain an integrated CEP capability.

For us, this kind of “territorial discussion” goes to the heart of why we did what we did in ActiveVOS 6.0. ActiveVOS 6.0 is something new…what we call a visual orchestration system. We put CEP, BPMS, BPEL and more together in a single product precisely because we believe that unifying disparate technologies is the key to finally creating an explosion of services-based applications. 

In his post, Tim Bass talks about a fraud routing example which he describes as BPM, not CEP. That may be classically correct. But who cares? Why have unnecessary and artificial boundaries among related technologies?

That’s the problem a visual orchestration system is designed to fix: the endless need for specialists. The constant conflict developers find themselves in all the time: “I need to do a services-based app, but I get to put all the pieces together myself.” We believe that when developers can choose from among many well-integrated, category-blurring technologies in a single visual orchestration system they will produce better, higher quality applications faster.

Take cars for example. Engine technology is clearly not the same as transmission technology. People simply want to start the car, and put it in gear and drive away. Likewise, developers don’t necessarily want to know the difference and become expert in the academic distinctions between BPM and CEP; they want to do fraud applications.

The real shocker is that IBM, SAP, Oracle and others ship developers an engine and a transmission separately, expect them to bolt them together themselves and presume that their customers accept it as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We don’t assume customers want that kind of suffering, of course, and our increasing traction for ActiveVOS gives us confidence we are moving away from this “my-technology-space-is-purer-without-yours” era.

So, while Tim has a good point that CEP is new, different and important, our belief is that the real innovation today is in finding a way to put all these things together into a compelling whole. 

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If Complex Event Processing (CEP) walks like a duck…

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ActiveVOS selected to orchestrate FBI’s Next Generation Identification system

In a new podcast, Dennis Byron of ebizQ talks with Active Endpoints CEO Mark Taber about visual orchestration systems in general and ActiveVOS in particular. There’s also an interesting discussion about the importance of standards like BPEL for creating service orchestrations.

Thanks to Dennis and Mark for a very interesting podcast, one that’s well worth your time.

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ebizQ’s Dennis Byron talks with Mark Taber about ActiveVOS, BPEL and open standards

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.

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Feast your eyes on the first public screenshot of ActiveVOS 6.0

We’re not surprised that our message to Java developers created quite a stir (Sandy’s comments, Alan Zeichick’s post, Dana Blanekhorn’s post, Adrian Bridgewater’s comments and Josh Fruhlinger’s post).

I knew it would, and there was significant soul-searching inside the company about releasing it and sending it to so many developers. I’d be the last to deny we’re promoting ActiveVOS and our company. (That is my job.) But being jingoistic was the last thing we were thinking. I was patterning the idea after something I did in a previous life in which we reported on the incidence of spam, something we were in position to know because we aggregated stats from spam filters. People loved it.

At Active Endpoints, we “know” something about the relative state of adoption of modern app dev technology in the Java community based on our geographic aggregate data that individual Java developers wouldn’t have access to unless we told them. And it’s an interesting data point because it does say something about relative economic advantage that economies with vastly larger GDP — and therefore an increased need to be agile– aren’t demonstrating the same alacrity of adoption that emerging economies are.

Do you think that the open-source SOA companies who claim “millions” of downloads in efforts to promote themselves as viable businesses in North America would have shared this with the community? I doubt it. It took a measure of courage to speak up.

I’d argue we’re being more honest by sharing what we’ve learned in the marketplace than most. And I’d hoped this would signal to the Java community what working with us would be like: we’re dedicated to what we do and we’ll always try to be open and direct. If we’ve scared a couple of people into wanting to move application development forward in their companies, we have arguably done those companies a service, whether or not they use ActiveVOS.

I think you can tell a lot about a company that will share its market knowledge with you and which wants to create constructive discussion about the impact of its technology on the businesses it seeks to serve.

This wasn’t a “buy American” screed. This was, instead, exactly what we called it: a wake-up call to the Java community to look past obstacles and move to the next level of services-based development.

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Our message to Java developers creates a stir

Copied below is the text of an email we sent today to more than 30,000 developers in the US. We are in a unique position to see what the rate of adoption of modern development tools is. And what we’ve seen is so strong a trend, we simply had to go public with what we’ve learned. As always, we welcome any comments or feedback, either here on our blog or via email to editor@activevos.com.

Attention US developers: Active Endpoints has a wake-up call for you

Dear Developer,

We are emailing you because we are concerned about you.  We’ve learned something about the state of middleware technology in the US, its impact on outsourcing and US business competitiveness that we felt strongly we should share with you.

Since early March, we have been offering downloads of our new ActiveVOS visual orchestration system at www.activevos.com. With ActiveVOS, you can automate, control, adapt and manage your services-based applications in ways you never dreamed were possible. And, you do it in a 100%-standards based environment, at breakthrough pricing.

As you might imagine, we watch our download statistics very carefully…sometime hourly. We expected to have downloads from all over the world, but the shocking truth is that a majority of our downloads are coming from outside the US, especially from India and China. A conversation I had with a marketing director at a major open-source ESB provider confirmed that company is seeing fully half of its downloads from India and China.

At first, we couldn’t believe it. And we were surprised, because the US market for app dev products is several orders of magnitude larger than in these developing markets. Then, we started asking ourselves questions like “Why is this so pronounced a trend?” And “what do these developers, business analysts and companies know that US enterprises don’t?”

The answers are clear. US companies have become too caught up in the complexity of their current systems…too content to be dictated to by proprietary middleware vendors…too comfortable with their status quo. Meanwhile, companies without legacy issues – and without the temptation to use those issues as an excuse for stasis – adopt the most effective and modern middleware technologies rapidly.

Is it any wonder, then, that US developers are increasingly frustrated by the slow pace of change, the threat to their jobs, and the technical and political paralysis created by so-called enterprise architectures?

Clearly, we hope you will be the agent for change in your company and download ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com. We hope you will take advantage of our education center to update your skills. We hope you will join the hundreds of developers who have watched the replay of webinar we hosted called “BPEL for Java Developers.” (You can find it on our blog at www.vosibilities.com or in our podcast feed in the iTunes Store; search for “VOSibilities.”)

But mostly, we hope you will carefully consider the fact that the status quo in application development in your company is a very dangerous proposition. No matter how daunting change may seem, it’s better than the alternative: a world in which your company and you personally have been eclipsed by external competitors.

 

Thank you.

 

Alex Neihaus
VP Marketing
Active Endpoints, Inc.
editor@activevos.com

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Attention US developers: Active Endpoints has a wake-up call for you

For the last several weeks, there’s been a lot of blog discussion about a Burton Group report on SOA “success” or the apparent lack of it.

An interesting thread of commentary has broken out about the role of CIOs in the success or failure of next-generation application development in business. David Linthicum suggests that CIOs are “…very different animals from company to company.” And Scott Wilson thinks CIOs are in a “delicate position” when it comes to adopting new technologies, balancing needs to progress versus reliable service delivery.

For us, it’s simpler: it’s much more dangerous — bordering on suicidal — to let the fear of change become the rationale for continued stasis. That’s why Burton reports that companies get better results with newly hired CIOs. The new guy has a honeymoon period in which he or she can do the unthinkable. (Marketing execs in software companies are almost as perishable as CIOs. We are often brought in to “fix” the previous guy’s reluctance to change.)

But at the end of the day, a change in leadership doesn’t change the underlying reality that the whole IT organization — from the developer in his cube to the CIO — just isn’t scared enough.

Sure, they’re a little bit scared: “If we have to change, we run a risk.” But it’s the wrong thing they’re afraid of…the wrong fear.

What’s a fossil? Something that stood still long enough to get buried, then wedged into rock to be cooked by pressure over time until it disappears. That’s what developers, analysts, business owners and CIOs are doing: letting the small fear of change become comfortable enough to crowd out the large, more important fear of being fossilized.

And that’s a whole lot scarier. For the business…for individuals.

If this sounds like a wake-up call to developers to lose more sleep at night over why they keep finding reasons not to move to services-based apps, it is. If you think we are saying that enterprise architects should be put on a multi-step program to recovery from PowerPoint architectures, we are. If you think we are suggesting the CIO is more damned if he doesn’t implement today’s visual orchestration systems, you’ve got it.

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More damned if you don’t

Many readers will remember a couple of years ago when Justice Antonin Scalia was caught giving “an obscene gesture” to reporters after getting a question he didn’t like.

Today, a lot of SAP and Oracle customers have got to be feeling like they’ve just been given that very gesture by SAP and Oracle, who have both substantially raised prices (here and here).

I guess that with the very big increases in the cost of transporting those very heavy license keys and object code across the Internet, Oracle and SAP felt they were justified in nailing customers’ budgets to the wall yet again.

Here at Active Endpoints, we wonder how long corporate users will permit themselves to be abused like this. And from what we hear from customers on a daily basis, it’s not just the pricing that’s obscene, the products themselves are unusable.

Just this morning, one of our sales guys told me he’d just spoken to a customer that had completely failed with the obese, impenetrable middleware that had been inflicted on him and who had, in desperation, tried ActiveVOS. This customer said he’d succeed with ActiveVOS without any training.

Let us help you get on a two-step program to recovery. First, figure out what it’ll cost you to use ActiveVOS. We publish our prices — which anybody can understand — right on our website. Step two: download ActiveVOS, try it, and see how much you can achieve with a fraction of the effort or pain compared to anything — and I mean anything  — else out there.

Go on…give the gesture back to Oracle, SAP and IBM. It’ll feel great. You’ll be 10 years younger, you’ll feel like a new man or woman…and your enterprise development capabilities will loose two tons of weight.

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SAP and Oracle give middleware users an “Alito”

I expect that by now most everyone has seen the amazing film Wall-E in which a corporation called BNL — for “Big and Large” literally destroys Earth and emasculates humanity of its ability to survive on the planet.

Ryan Bagnulo of Aspect-i and I were talking about enterprises and their surprising tendency to remain with the status quo even when they should know better. And how that’s just fine with the big three — IBM, Oracle and SAP. Suddenly, Ryan said, “That’s kind of what happened in Wall-E!” At that point, I had to record the conversation for our listeners because it was so compelling a comparison.

That lead to this podcast in which Ryan and I discuss how IBM, SAP and Oracle are almost exactly like BNL and are quite content to let enterprises get so porked up on closed, proprietary application development software that they can’t get out of their chairs…to mix metaphors.

We hope you like the podcast, and as always, welcome your responses.

[After I posted this, I came across this broadside of SAP's pricing policies on Cnet. Need any more proof that these companies will suck the life out of enterprise application development buyers?]

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VOSibilities podcast #13: Why IBM, SAP and Oracle should have been in “Wall-E”

In this podcast episode, I talk with Active Endpoints’ CEO, Mark Taber, about our company’s vision for how we intend to “democratize” complex event processing (CEP) and stream processing so that everyone can benefit from these technologies in their applications.

Mark describes the concepts and then talks about why we believe these technologies should be part of every visual orchestration system — and previews what we’ll be delivering in ActiveVOS in our upcoming release in August, 2008.

As always, we appreciate your support of our podcast, as demonstrated by the large number of people who are downloading and subscribing to this content, and we welcome all feedback. Just email us at editor@vosibilities.com.

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VOSibilities podcast #12: Complex event processing and visual orchestration systems

Last week, David Linthicum’s SOA podcast continued a theme he’s been on lately, a discussion of BPEL’s “fallings” [sic]. I think he meant failings…but in any event, he mentions several times in the podcast that a post he’d previously written on this topic had generated quite a discussion (it did) and feedback from unnamed “BPEL vendors” (that’d be us; I can’t imagine why he didn’t name us. (-: )

Anyway, today after I heard the podcast, I asked Chris Keller, our founder and vp of development and one of the most knowledgeable people on BPEL in the world for his feedback. Chris has not only written the BPEL engine that’s at the core of our visual orchestration system (a VOS is a whole lot more than a BPEL engine), he’s active on the OASIS committees that are furthering the standards.

Chris gave me a lot of food for thought, and being in a playful mood, I thought it might be fun to that feedback into a Q&A. Sorta like a game show, with Mr. Linthicum as the contestant. The prize, for correct answers, is a free ActiveVOS license. Let’s see how Mr. Linthicum does…

Question 1: In the podcast, David says that a major problem with BPEL is that it’s synchronous.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out… Then click here to read the correct answer
Sorry, no. Chris points out that the exact opposite is true. BPEL is asynchronous by definition.

Question 2: David says BPEL has a few programmer-level issues including limitations around request/reply exchanges in a heterogeneous architecture.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out…Then click here to read the correct answer
Whooppss…wrong again. Chris points out that this isn’t a problem with BPEL as much as it is a problem with vendor support for standards that make request-response asynchronous, like reliable messaging. It’s one prime reasons for the WS-TF standards effort.

Question 3: David says BPEL has issues with failure recovery, exception handling and multi-programming model support.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out…Then click here to read the correct answer
So very sorry. Chris points that exception handling is covered by the specifications and that recovery isn’t something that belongs in the specification at all (This is a major differentiator among vendors, and something ActiveVOS does brilliantly — ed.). As for multi-programming model support, we aren’t quite sure what David means, but if he’s talking about multi-tasking, the spec has that covered, too.

Question 4: David says BPEL is not very good at adding a human as part of the process and as SOA moves forward, he’s finding that composites and workflows are more applicable than simple service binding and extending.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out…Then click here to read the correct answer
Close…but no cigar. Chris points WS-HT and BPEL4People have been added to the specification for precisely this purpose. While David’s criticism was once correct, it’s not applicable today.

We hope that you’ve enjoyed our little episode of The BPEL Game Show. And sorry, David, but you didn’t win our prize. However, anytime you’d like to be brought up-to-date on why BPEL is at the heart of SOA development, we’re happy to update you so you can win the next time.

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The BPEL Game Show…with contestant David Linthicum

In a recent post, David Linthicum asks if BPEL is irrelevant. And just as David predicts BPEL providers would do, we fundamentally disagree with the premise. In fact, we don’t see how you could create an SOA without BPEL.

As I read the post it seems he has two sets objections. First, a lack of integration of people into processes and second, a collection of concerns about recovery and exception handling.

ActiveVOS is the first development system that’s based on BPEL 2.0 with no proprietary extensions and to include BPEL4People. As a result, it’s the only 100% standards-based way to achieve long-running orchestrations that include human tasks as first-class participants in the orchestrations.

And if you want recovery and error handling, how’s this: what if you could, in a running orchestration, dynamically switch endpoints when the primary wasn’t available? What if you could change what a running orchestration does based on the current state of the overall business process? IOW, if you could determine that processes that included human tasks had problems with the quality of the work and as a result you could dynamically change what happens to in-flight orchestrations? What if you could, very simply, suspend a failed transaction — one that might have been running for weeks or even months — so that corrective action could be taken? What if you could easily version processes so that in-flight orchestrations could conclude before a new process is implemented?

These are just some of the things that ActiveVOS does that we believe are part and parcel of creating applications in a services-based environment and for which there are no real substitutes. BPMN ain’t gonna do all this (it’s not even executable). AJAX and most Web 2.0 technologies are primarily front-of-screen and do nothing to manage the amazing complexities of long-running orchestrations made up of heterogeneous services.

David, don’t pull that trigger until you talk with us. We’re happy to show you (and anyone else) all this and more, anytime, anywhere. I think you’ll come away with a completely different perception.

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Mr. Linthicum, please don’t shoot our cuddly BPEL pet just yet

Have you ever bought a consumer electronic device, gotten it home and then decided that the purchase was a big, big mistake because the remote control was nothing but unrelated, unlabeled buttons that were not lighted for visibility in a dark room?

Well, after five or six years of singing the “SOA is piece parts” jingle and installing buttons without labels or lights, enterprise architects, consultants and the industry in general are discovering that business users, specifically application developers in line of business development teams, can’t do anything useful with “SOA.” No surprise there, though the purists blame “culture” or “people and process failures” or, my favorite, the “inability to sell the benefits of SOA inside the organization.”

Face it, SOA has been a juggernaut for enterprise software companies eager to prey upon large companies’ insatiable need for flexibility in order to sell them (parts of) the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s one of the oldest scams in the world: pretty your pig with the currently popular scent. This is how even CAD systems — about as far from SOA as you can imagine — got the SOA label.

Now, we’re beginning to see more and more of the kind of teeth-gnashing reappraisal that accompanies dire predictions of the “failure” of SOA. And, not coincidentally, the desire to find the next big thing: AJAX is hot, so why not WOA?

All of this angst about SOA is clearly prelude to the mass adoption of SOA. Once SOA moves from concept and process to actual developer-oriented product — just as the web went from HTTP (the standard that embodies a concept) to browsers (a product developers can develop for) — mass adoption is inevitable.

Consider this comment from Chris Howard of the Burton Group at Interop, as reported by Network World’s Jon Brodkin:

…very often, IT departments implement a SOA program that may be technically proficient but doesn’t meet the needs of business users…

Hear, hear. Howard also talks of “fatigue” setting in. Of course people will tire of essentially abstract and useless toys as the realities of needing to succeed in business overwhelm the desire to play all day.

Let me give you another indication of SOA-as-piece-parts fatigue: we’ve cancelled our pay-per-click campaigns on SOA search terms on the major search engines. The words are expensive, thanks to the enterprise software companies that hope to sell more unintelligible remote controls, and the clicks we received weren’t people looking for solutions — just more architecture.

Instead, we hit a nerve when we started talking to Java developers about how to create service orchestrations with a visual orchestration system. We’ve had 200 people attend and nearly 400 people watch a replay of a webinar showing Java developers how to succeed in actually creating something and deploying it as opposed to training them how to sew together some Rube Goldberg application architecture.

However self-serving it seems, I am confident that we at Active Endpoints are on exactly the correct product track, one that will bring SOA to fruition: actual tooling, digestible by mere mortals, that makes creating true SOA-based applications both easy and fun.

We are all about adding lights and intelligible labels to the remote control.

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Where SOA went wrong

Pssst…wanna have some fun at JavaOne? Join us for our Tiki Bar Party on Wednesday May 7, 2008. Get all the details here.

Why a Tiki Bar Party? Because we’re big, big fans of Tiki Bar TV and we wanted to have some fun ourselves. So, we maxed out on the kitsch and we’ve invited a bunch of people — including you — to join us.

But you have to work for those free cocktails (featuring unforgettable tipples like the BPEL Island Julep and the VOSarita). You gotta get two button at the show and then wear ‘em to the Bamboo Hut to get in. Pictures of these oh-so-cool-you’d-want-’em-anyway buttons are below. Where do you get the buttons? At the Active Endpoints and XAware booths, which are in Startup Row in the Pavilion.

How can you lose? Cool buttons, cooler drinks and fun people. Sounds like a pahhty. We hope to see you there. Remember: check out www.javaoneparty.com, print the invite and get those buttons to join us at the best party at JavaOne this year.

Here’s the Active Endpoints button:

 Here’s XAware’s button:

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Active Endpoints and XAware are having a party at Java One and you’re invited

I was reading Frank Cohen’s blog today (he was nice enough to help get the word out about our webinar on Java and BPEL this coming Thursday) and I ran across this very interesting comment Frank made after having attended a Java conference recently:

Java architects and developers are frustrated looking for Business Process Management (BPM) standards and tools. Brian Sletten’s talk…was titled “Avoiding ESBs” but could have been better described as “I’m sick and tired of waiting for vendors to give me a decent Business Process Management (BPM) platform!”

Here in VOSville, we think one of the mega VOSibilities (that’s posibilities for those of you who are already tired of my lame puns) that exists in the marketplace is at the junction of visual orchestration systems and BPM. I know, I know, this ain’t very specific. But, I can’t say anything more at the moment.

Let me just say that we are cooking up sumthin’ very special that will answer this precise criticism. And, I promise, you won’t have to wait long to see the water (and our competitors’ blood) boil.

But, you do have to wait. While you do, Frank was kind enough to send over information on a bootcamp his company is holding. Here’re the details. You should check it out.

Frank Cohen and Robert Schneider are putting on their Open-Source Test Automation Bootcamp, a 3-Day Hands-On Course, in Philadelphia on May 14-16, 2008. Companies such as AMD, Amazon, TV Guide, Ford, and The Jackson Labs sent their testers, architects, and managers to learn Frank and Rob’s test methodology, test patterns, and best practices. Plus they received hands-on training with free open-source test tools, including soapUI, Selenium, and PushToTest.

The Bootcamp delivers hands-on training to test Web applications, Web services, Ajax, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and REST applications to optimize these for performance, reliability, and proper function. The Seminar teaches practical methodology and techniques to surface performance bottlenecks and optimizations to improve scalability and throughput.

Bootcamp instructors Frank Cohen and Robert Schneider are the leading authorities and teachers for testing and optimizing software developed with Web, SOA, AJAX, and REST designs and implementations.

Details can be found at http://bootcamp.pushtotest.com

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BPM and Java: Do you get the feeling the pot isn’t boiling yet?

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Active Endpoints Announces the Java Advancement Kit

Please join us for an informative webinar on April 17 entitled BPEL Basics for Java Developers. Register here.

This informative webinar will help you expand your Java knowledge to acquire an understanding of the basics of BPEL. A high-level overview of BPEL and its importance in a web-services environment will be presented, along with a brief discussion of the basic BPEL activities and how they relate to Java concepts. The following topics will be covered:
• Parsing the Language of SOA with Java as a guide
• Breaking out of the VM: evolving from RPC to Web Services
• BPEL Activities – Receive, Reply, Invoke • BPEL Facilities – Fault Handling and Compensation (“Undo”)

We hope you can join us.

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Webinar: BPEL Basics for Java Developers, 17 April 2008, 2pm EDT, 11am PDT, 18:00 GMT

Try as I might, I can’t find a single line of source code in the download of Intalio’s Community Edition ”open source BPMS.” Imagine my surprise at this considering they have been claiming open source leadership for years. They even call themselves “the leading Open Source BPMS company.” Sure, you can find source code for individual piece parts if you go to another website and find it as part of Intalio’s donations to open source projects, but here I am talking about their claims of open source leadership in regards to their Community Edition product.

Because of the complexity of enterprise software, I believe software companies have to hold themselves to a higher level of “truth in labelling.” We don’t like it when toothpaste has antifreeze in it. And I don’t like it when an purportedly open source product has no source and licensing restrictions that sound like they were written in Redmond or Walldorf.

It may be simplistic but calling something “open source” means you get source code. While Sandy Kemsley finds it amusing when I quote Wikipedia, the simple fact is that Wikipedia’s definition of FOSS says open source allows users to “…study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code” (emphasis mine). To call yourself the “open source leader” and to launch an “open source service” (whatever that is) means you should conform to the conventional definition of what FOSS is. And that ain’t what Intalio is doing, near as I can tell.

I was recently fact-checking an upcoming analyst report on BPMS in which the author mentioned in passing that Intalio didn’t actually include source in its Community Edition downloads. I was dumbfounded (and more than a little miffed that these analysts could so blithely give these guys a pass on so fundamental a point).

Incredulous, I asked our product management people to take a look. As willing as I am to call Intalio out for misleading users about its Community Edition, I am still not willing to cut and paste the heated analysis I got back from the product managers. So, let me try to summarize:

• As far as we can tell, the license included with their product includes the restriction that users may not “…decompile, disassemble, or otherwise reverse engineer or attempt to reconstruct or discover any source code or underlying ideas or algorithms of the Intalio Software by any means whatsoever…” (again, emphasis mine)
• As far back as 2006, Intalio was happy allow confusion between “open source-like” and real open source in its licensing to morph into “open source leadership.” (Here, you have to knock Gartner for not being more consistent and giving Intalio the room to claim open source street cred undeservedly.)
• At the end of the day, Intalio’s claim of an open source mantle isn’t about standards or FOSS, it’s about its sales model.

It’s that last point that I really object to. It’s OK to be proprietary. It’s OK not to ship the source code. What’s not OK is to use the terminology of standards and open source to confuse users for the (very legitimate) purpose of driving sales. That’s just misleading.

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Intalio: the Open Source BPMS Leader?

Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group has recently written a post that sums up what I believe is the missing in the discussion of SOA and BPM: the enormous challenge in getting line-of-business developer teams to use these techniques.

Anne writes:

I’ve talked to many companies that have implemented stunningly beautiful SOA infrastructures that support managed communications using virtualized proxies and dynamic bindings. They’ve deployed the best technology the industry has to offer — including registries, repositories, SOA management, XML gateways, and even the occasional ESB. Many have set up knowledge bases, best practices, guidance frameworks, and governance processes. And yet these SOA initiatives invariably stall out. The techies just can’t sell SOA to the business. They have yet to demonstrate how all this infrastructure yields any business value.

More to the point, the techies have not been able to explain to the business units why they should adopt a better attitude about sharing and collaboration–which is the fundamental cultural shift required for SOA to succeed. The pervasive attitude is “What’s in it for me?” As one of my interviewees said, “Altruism is not an enterprise strategy”.

Many Americans will remember former President Clinton’s famous prescription for political success in the 1992 presidential campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.” In a single sound bite, Clinton moved beyond technical discussions of monetary and fiscal policy to the heart of the matter: people cared then, as now in a period of economic turmoil, about bread-and-butter issues.

The challenge of SOA and BPM in business today is that it’s all been high-falutin’ theory. And lots — lots — of money spent on piece parts that look good on architecture diagrams but which are unimplementable by mere mortals in line of business development project teams.

It’s no wonder these “stunningly beautiful SOA infrastructures” cannot be “sold” to the business. By themselves, they do do nothing. Squat, nichts, nada. It takes developers to make these investments pay back for the business and those guys are too smart to sign up for science projects when they get paid to do business applications.

Those who care about SOA and BPM and making it real should take Anne’s advice and stop navel-gazing at their lovely accomplishments. The discussion needs to turn to how to enable real developers to use SOA effectively.

To anyone reading this blog, it’ll come as no surprise that we are quite sure we have the answer. That’s why we created a new category, the visual orchestration system, and a new product, ActiveVOS, specifically for line of business application developers.

It’s a tall claim, but we have the stuff to prove it. (It’s also why we took the unusual step of putting a top-level menu on our new website called “Proof“.) ActiveVOS is all about the application, stupid. And it’s about ending the habit of peeling money off the roll simply to build beautiful architectures nobody can use.

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Selling SOA and BPM inside the enterprise: It’s the application, stupid

 I’ve been saving this episode’s video for the release of ActiveVOS 5.0. In this podcast, Mike Pellegrini, our chief architect, white boards the revolutionary concepts behind the new scenario testing and remote debugging capabilities in ActiveVOS 5.0.

Now that we have shipped ActiveVOS 5.0, I think episode becomes much more powerful because you can actually request an evaluation and try this for yourself. I’ve seen demonstrations of these new capabilities and I can tell you that if I were working in a SOA or BPM environment, this is precisely what I would want. Testing message-based, loosely coupled applications made of up black boxes isn’t an easy thing to even think about, much less achieve.

Or at least it wasn’t until we shipped ActiveVOS 5.0. (Those of you reading this post on our blog can click the image above to see a screenshot of some of these amazing new features.)

We hope you enjoy Mike’s chalk-talk.

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VOSibilities podcast #2: Mike Pellegrini on scenario testing in SOA applications

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?

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BPMN: An SOA Etch-A-Sketch without BPEL?

Well, this is my first real “content” post and I am about to challenge no less than eminent industry notable and EDS Fellow Fred Cummins, who recently took the opportunity to declare BPEL4People dSOAoa (pronounced d-SEW-ah-oh-ah and meaning “Dead SOA on arrival”).

I am not sure if Fred’s problem core problem is with BPEL4People as much as it is with BPEL itself, which he dismisses as “for programmers.” But it’s clear he doesn’t think much of either standard, favoring instead BPMN. And I’ll be the first to admit that I am not the one who can specifically refute many of his technical arguments.

But I do know one thing: being “for programmers” when it comes to standards-based workflow ain’t a bad thing. That’s because from my relatively non-technical perspective, two things have always been true about workflow systems. First, the support for them in programming languages has been abominable and, second, every single end-user workflow system that has ever been tried has been a failure.

If the charge is “BPEL (and therefore BPEL4People) is a programming language,” then my counter-charge is that BPMN is about non-executable pretty pictures. Wikipedia says, “The primary goal of BPMN is to provide a standard notation that is readily understandable by all business stakeholders…”

Pretty diagrams do not a business application make.

In short, workflow is something that has to be developed into an application, not “specified” by some end-user on a canvas. That’s because while you can expect a developer to be capable of understanding the workflow process and adapting it to the application, you can be certain an end-user won’t be able to integrate his or her expert-level knowledge of the business process into a database or transaction system.

One area I suspect Fred and I agree on, though, is the need for standards. Another reason workflow has been ineffective in business applications is that business are loathe to lock up their processes in proprietary formats. What BPEL4People and BPMN offer users is the opportunity to free themselves from proprietary workflow engines, which is surely a good thing.

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BPEL4People vs. BPMN: your dead horse is my thoroughbred

Also today, OASIS announced the formation of a technical committee focused on finalizing the BPEL4People specification. We are participating in this technical committee and look forward to BPEL4People once and for all eliminating proprietary workflow from enterprise applications.

You can read more about Community Edition in our press release, attached to this post.

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Active Endpoints releases milestone 1 of ActiveBPEL Community Edition with BPEL4People

This is a big moment for me…if not for you. This is the first post on our brand-spankin’ new blog. And I’m all excited about the possibilities.

I’ve been involved with a number of blogs for other companies over the last year or two. And I’ve discovered that a surprising number of people come back to read the first post. A first post therefore needs a little of the mixture of celebration and relief people feel when that new ocean liner actually launches when the woman (always a female for some reason) breaks the bottle of champagne over its bow. Or maybe it’s just me being traditional, but it seems all new blogs that are any good start with a bit of …ahem… manifesto.

So, herewith our objectives. We hope this blog will be informative and in the words of some people I recently worked with, cheeky. We already are showing a little cheek (sorry, it starts right away) by naming this blog "VOSibilities." The pun on visual orchestration systems and the word "possibilities" is courtesy of our own Victor Chan.

Let me say for the first time something we’ll be saying repeatedly: we believe strongly that visual orchestration systems will revolutionize the way project teams design, develop, test, deploy and maintain composite applications. We seek nothing less than mass adoption of services-based applications, all done in an open, standards-based way. So, VOS is the category, VOS is the means, VOS is the objective…VOS is the answer.

But it’s the answer to what, exactly? It’s the answer to app dev miasma. That big, dark, noxious cloud of proprietary this and that, the uncertainty of being able to leverage skills and the inability to effectively absorb technology in a way that makes developing composite applications not just fast and efficient, but fun.

And because good technology is always fun, we’re gonna have a lot of it here. We’re going to get loud, we’re going to get visceral and we’re going to say what we think.

So, if you found this post before there was anything else on the blog, thank you. If you are reading it to wonder who the heck these loudmouths are, thank you. If you are one of the competitors I intend to skewer regularly here, a special thank you. And remember…it’s all in the name of open, direct debate.

This is just the first of many times we’ll get to talk to each other.

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Number one in a series on visual orchestration systems