VOSibilities

Keith Swenson has posted this interesting list of questions to ask a BPM vendor.  I liked his emphasis on standards, since it is so important that the hard work that goes into creating business processes not be trapped in proprietary technology.  However, I think he concentrated on the wrong standard — XPDL.  If you really care about safeguarding your investment in your processes, the standard that you should care the most about is BPEL4People.

Don’t get me wrong, XPDL has its place.  ActiveVOS can both import and export XPDL version 2.1 (the latest version).   But XPDL is not a technology that will allow you to take an business process that is executable on one vendor’s BPM engine and move it to another vendor’s engine.  It just won’t work.  If you are lucky, the resulting business process diagram will look recognizable because the “abstract model” (as XPDL calls it) will import successfully.  But don’t get your hopes up about saving all the work that you did on the executable details.

The problem is not that XPDL has no place to put those executable details — it does.  It just doesn’t put enough constraints on what should go there.  There are just too many different things you can do, so no two tools do the same things.   Also, the bar for being able to say that you support XPDL 2.1 is just too low.  If a tool exports something that conforms to the XML Schema (possibly with liberal use of extensions) and import doesn’t barf on any Schema-valid input, then the tool conforms.  But don’t look for guarantees that you will see, much less be able to execute, anything reasonable.

By contrast, users of ActiveVOS have had great success in using BPEL-based business processes that were created by either IBM, Oracle or TIBCO tooling.  They have also found that the BPEL generated by ActiveVOS can be used by the tools of those other vendors.  That is real investment protection.

I do like Keith’s idea of having a list of questions for BPM vendors to help in the evaluation process.  I think the best way to organize such an evaluation is around four key areas.

Are the key BPM standards supported?

• Does the product generate executable WS-BPEL 2.0 processes?
• Can you model processes using BPMN?
• Does the product use the BPEL4People for activities that are handled by people?
• Are worklists and tasks exposed through the WS-HumanTask standard?
• Does it support the important enterprise web-service standards, such as WS-Security and WS-ReliableMessaging?
• How about non-SOAP access to services, such as JMS, REST or plain Java?
• Does the product import and export XPDL?

Does the development environment make the process developer highly productive, especially for processes that are larger than mere toys?  For some important examples, how easy is it to:

• Incorporate existing web services into a process?
• Detect changes to web service definitions and update the process accordingly?
• Define services provided by the process (including defining XML Schemas and WSDL)?
• Define new human tasks using existing data definitions (XSDs)?
• Prepare the input data for human tasks or services?
• Support services that “call back” into a running process, and specify the appropriate data to use for correlation?
• Find all uses of a variable within a large process?

An executable process is deployed software.  What support is available for ensuring and maintaining its quality?

• Is there test case generation?
• Is there test suite support?
• Is there remote debugging?
• Is there Metadata for controlling the difference between staging and deployment?
• Can you new versions without effecting existing process instances?
• Can you deploy new versions that do change existing process instances?

What can be done to a running instance?  Can you:

• See where it has been (with anotations on the process diagram)?
• View current and historical data?
• Change data?
• Skip activities?
• Single step through activities?
• Rewind execution, optionally reverting all process data to what it was?

What kind of runtime console support is there?

• Can you get reports with either operational or business information?
• Can the end user create any kind of new report and incorporate it into the runtime console?
• How powerful is the query capability to find a process instance you care about?

All of these characteristics of a BPMS will eventually be important to anyone that is creating the kind of critical business processes that will really transform a business.  Knowing the answers to these questions can help you to avoid making the wrong choice.

Integration developer Adam Swift at Fastenal describes how his team uses ActiveVOS to quickly implement SOA-based applications for vital business processes, including an order management system. Read the article here.

It’s my great pleasure to post a conversation with my colleagues here at Active Endpoints, Michael Rowley, director of technology and strategy and Luc Clément, senior director of products in which they discuss the themes and features in our new release, ActiveVOS 6.1.

Michael and Luc detail how ActiveVOS 6.1 has masked the complexity of BPEL, allowing developers to work more naturally to create advanced SOA-based BPM applications. Luc and Michael also discuss the capabilities of a new feature in ActiveVOS 6.1 called “process rewind” which permits new levels of control over running processes.

And, Michael and Luc give a sneak peak at what’s next for ActiveVOS 6.1, discussing how a BPMN-style canvas can improve collaboration in the development of BPM applications. You may also find the the What’s New in ActiveVOS 6.1 document we posted earlier this week on the blog informative as well.

Whether you are a current user of ActiveVOS or you are evaluating BPM systems, I hope you will find this podcast an informative update. As I am posting this podcast before ActiveVOS 6.1 is officially released, I do not yet have direct links to the new content on our website. But if you visit our home page starting March 10, 2009, you will be able to quickly find updated samples, documentation, demonstrations and, of course, a free trial of ActiveVOS 6.1.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #28: ActiveVOS 6.1: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (240)

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.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #27 An Update on the BPEL4People Standard [24:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (289)

Today, we are announcing via press release the Vintage Old Stock demonstration application for Java developers who are interested in seeing how an SOA-based application is designed, built and deployed.

Details are in the press release attached below as well as in Luc’s previous pre-holiday post about the demo. Included in the press release are instructions on how you can download a customized version of the ActiveVOS demo to experiment with the application on your own machine.

 Active Endpoints Announces New Learning Tool for Java Developers: Download (339)

Do you know what this logo is?  It’s the new Pepsi logo. What does Pepsi have to do with SOA?

To start off 2009 with a bang, Anne Thomas Manes has written a blog post declaring the term “SOA” dead. Like her previous post on the “failures” of SOA, this post is certain to get a lot of attention.

But a careful reading shows Ms. Manes only wants to kill the term SOA, not, of course, the technological movement which it defines and which she asserts is still critically important to improving application development.

I’ve heard this desire to make SOA a dirty word a lot lately, even inside Active Endpoints. And, as a marketing person, I recognize it for what it is: message fatigue from the avant-garde.

Like the marketing guys at Pepsi, the cognoscenti are tired of talking about SOA. They need something new, something exciting, something…effervescent to talk about. It’s not that the term SOA is dead…it’s simply boring, pedestrian.

In a startup company, the biggest marketing danger is thinking that the “world” knows what you’re saying. When you are small, the noise level around you is so high and the competition is so stiff that your message can’t ever get out unless you stick with it. But creative people don’t like repetition. They thrive on the new. So many technology startups fools themselves into thinking that “everyone knows” what they do. And they move on…into obscurity.

Like a startup company, the thought-leaders that truly believe in SOA as a way of doing things are about to abandon the term at the exact moment it becomes a mainstream, accepted way of doing things.Their need for the new — at least new terminology — threatens consolidation of the very movement they championed. (And it risks generating cynicism among thought-leaders who get frustrated by the incomplete adoption of the “latest thing.” It’s a self-fulfilling cycle: how can something be completely adopted if pundits abandon technology before the movement is consolidated?)

Incomplete adoption is possible because the companies contemplating SOA now are the middle and late adopters. They aren’t the early people who conflated an ESB with SOA. Adopters today are not bleeding-edge customers. They let someone else suffer those pangs.

ActiveVOS’s success in 2008 was, in part, because customers aren’t interested in technological debates. Instead, they wanted modern, affordable, all-in-one technology to achieve their business objectives. They don’t “debate” SOA. They simply implement it.

And in a surprising number of cases in 2008, ActiveVOS displaced or was installed alongside the SOA offerings from IBM and Oracle. Why? Because the never-ending need for “newness” in those products…uh, excuse me…”stacks”…makes them indigestible for customers looking to actually achieve something with their application portfolios. Like the pundits, many big competitors of ours keep “revising the logo,” confusing their customers and delaying consolidation of the SOA movement into the mainstream.

So, would a new term help SOA? I don’t think so…it’s like the Pepsi logo. It makes a lot of leading-edge people feel great. (”Wow, isn’t that beauuuutiful?”)  But it unnecessarily confuses large numbers of people who thought they understood what was going on and who had just begun to dip their toes into the SOA water. 

Loraine Lawson recently did a great job of summarizing some of the predictions for 2009 for IT. Loraine noticed that there was one item that was common among the predictions by David Linthicum, Joe McKendrick and Eric Roch. Joe put it this way: “There will be fewer big-bang SOA projects rolled across the whole enterprise, and many more incremental, bottom-up efforts — many of which may be under the radar.” Although not mentioned in Loraine’s post, Dana Gardner also has this podcast interview with several pontificators who predict, among other things, that businesses in 2009 will emphasize projects that can reduce costs in the near term.

So, what technology do you want to use if you already have several services and you want to quickly and easily create a few new services, partly by building off of existing services and partly from scratch? Installing an ESB would be a mistake. If you already have one, that’s great, but a small project isn’t the right place to kick off the move to an enterprise-wide bus.

What about development technologies? Should you create your new services using JAX-WS and JAXB deployed using JavaEE deployment machinery? No. Why pay all of the complexity costs related to mapping XML and web services into Java in this case? The new business logic would be so dwarfed by all of the generated code and configuration files that it would be lost in the muck. Just the JAXB generated classes alone will usually be counted in dozens for any real XML document.

Why not use an orchestration language that is already designed to use XML and WSDL as the native type system for the variables and method signatures? In other words why not use BPEL? If the new service can’t be fully automated you can use BPEL4People to handle the involvement of people in the service.

Of course using the right language is not sufficient. For the project to be small and simple, it should also be easy to test and deploy. It should make it easy to manage running services. And just because you want high developer productivity doesn’t mean you can give up the need to develop truly high performance services. And if the project is really going to generate a quick ROI and operate “under the radar,” it has to be budget-friendly.

ActiveVOS anyone?

We know this time of year is supposed to be slow, but we’ve got a present for you anyway. Hot off the presses is a product review of ActiveVOS 6.0 by Paul O’Connor. Paul is SOA Practice Director and Chief SOA Architect for e-brilliance LLC (a leading SOA consultancy).

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.

 ActiveVOS 6.0 Product Review: Download (555)

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

‘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!

Active Endpoints, in collaboration with fifteen other vendors and enterprises, announces formation of group to promote web services interoperability.

 Ebook: Download (287)

Bruce Silver has written an excellent post about the current state of BPM standards (with an emphasis on the “M” being Modeling, rather than Management). I am going to nitpick a little, however.

Bruce writes:

Because BPEL is more “technical” than BPMN, it is favored by developers who find nothing more annoying than business-types wanting to “collaborate” on implementation.

I disagree that developers don’t want to collaborate with their business-minded colleagues. This is the stereotype, of course, but in my experience it really hasn’t been true. The real question is whether or not business analysts and developers need to work on same model. Neither the developer nor the business analyst really wants this since they have different needs.

Bruce talks about one of these differences: business people using unstructured graph-oriented control flow vs. the structured control flow favored by developers. It’s clear why these different users would need different ways to diagram control flow.

So these difference needs dictate different representations. With the unstructured control flow, it is pretty easy to get into trouble (where “trouble” is defined as something that’s unclear at execution time) . For example, some modelers prefer to use conditional sequence flow (small diamonds on outbound transitions) rather than XOR gateways. Kieth Swenson has a good example and a couple blog posts (here and here) that discuss this. Unfortunately, with the current semantics, it is easy to get into trouble.

Think about this process model:

The business analysts might not think very hard about whether the thing could be red and blue, so at runtime it turns out that both paths could be taken and then you would end up with two simultaneous executions of “D”. That is legal, but probably not what was desired and difficult to debug.

It is the transition from unstructured to structured — as the model is handed from the business analyst to the developer — that causes these issues to surface. The developer will still use something that uses the BPMN notation, but with limitations that basically make it look structured. So yes, round trip is hurt. The developer doesn’t hand back to the modeler the same picture. It has been unwound a bit. This is a less comfortable style for the business analyst, but it’s certainly still understandable.

I don’t think Bruce disagrees with most of this thinking, because what he concludes is exactly in line with my thinking:

We need to recognize that standards for process modeling and process execution have different purposes and benefits. They should be linked, but with proper attention to those differences.

In this post, Dana Gardner has identified critical new reporting capabilities and added OS and platform support available in the latest version of ActiveVOS.

Today, Active Endpoints shipped ActiveVOS 6.0.2 with additional enhancements along with expanded operating system and database support. Details are in the press release attached to this post. We invite everyone to try ActiveVOS via a 30-day, supported, free trial.

Also, there’s still time to enter the Bring SOA Home for the Holidays contest. Simply by downloading ActiveVOS and submitting your good ideas, you could win a very, very cool Lenovo netbook.

 Active Endpoints ships ActiveVOS 6.0.2: Download (315)

I am pleased to post the second episode in our continuing series of product vignettes — short video recordings of important features in ActiveVOS.

This time, Mike Moniz demonstrates how to use ActiveVOS to customize the work list manager (he calls it an “inbox”) that users access in order to process tasks assigned to them by the ActiveVOS BPM system.

Make no mistake: what you are looking at is a fully compliant BPEL4People and the WS-Human Task client which can be easily modified to meet your UI requirements. By leveraging the inter-related BPEL4People and WS-HT standards, ActiveVOS is able to deftly include human activities in complex automated workflows.

Frequent readers of our blog know that there’s a healthy debate (here and here) going on about whether or not BPEL is appropriate for SOA-based BPM. (BPMN is often proposed as the “alternative.”) We think that debate misses the point: computers require precise definition of all the runtime details to run applications. Ergo, an execution-oriented language like BPEL is required.

We think the real question boils down to: does BPEL have what it takes to both run “on the metal” and permit the inclusion of human tasks into running processes? When you see what you can do with BPEL4People and WS-Human Task in ActiveVOS 6, the answer is clearly, “Yes.”

 

 VOSibilities podcast #25: Customizing a BPEL4People and WS-Human Task client worklist manager: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (771)
 VOSibilities podcast #25: Customizing a BPEL4People and WS-Human Task client worklist manager: Download (170)