VOSibilities

This talk describes BPMN’s concept of boundary events, how they should be used, and how they are related to events that are in the normal sequence flow and to event subprocesses. I also describe the difference between interrupting and non-interrupting boundary events and how processes that use boundary events are mapped to BPEL.

 

 CTOT 35: Boundary Events [39:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (13)

 CTOT 35: Boundary Events [39:55m]: Download (35)

 CTOT 35: Boundary Events: Download (17)

A number of standards efforts related to BPM are nearing completion of major milestones. This includes 4 standards efforts in 3 different standards development organizations:

• OASIS: BPEL4People 1.1 and WS-HumanTask 1.1
• OMG: BPMN 2.0
• WfMC: XPDL 2.2
• OASIS: SCA 1.1

In this week’s CTO Tuesdays, I describe the current state of each of these efforts along with a brief description of the history and main goals of these standards. Here is a recording of the presentation and a copy of the slides.

 

 CTO 32: BPM Standards Update [50:26m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (177)

 CTO 32: BPM Standards Update [50:26m]: Download (87)

 CTO 32: BPM Standards Update: Download (117)

This summer, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley and industry analyst, blogger and BPM expert Sandy Kemsley presented a series of webinars focusing on the “human aspects” of BPM.

On Thursday, July 22nd, in the final episode of the series, Sandy presented Five Things You Should Never Ever Try in Process Development. Rather than concentrating on best practices, which often devolve into motherhood-and-apple-pie statements, Sandy was able to compile a succinct list of process development practices that she has seen in real organizations, but which should never ever be done. Michael Rowley then demonstrated how those bad practices can be avoided and good ones followed in a live demonstration of the ActiveVOS BPMN process designer. The audience asked questions of both Sandy and Michael, which prompted some excellent discussions. A replay of the presentation is attached to this post below.

 

 BPM Summer Camp session 3: Five things [70:09m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (180)

 BPM Summer Camp session 3: Five things [70:09m]: Download (147)

 BPM Summer Camp session 3: Five things [70:09m]: Download (44)

 BPM Summer Camp session 3: Five things: Download (71)

In this recording of CTO Tuesdays, I describe the history of the key standards that are important for SOA, such as XML (starting back with SGML), XML Schema, SOAP, WSDL and BPEL. I also describe some of the key architectural characteristics of SOA that drove the standards, as well as some of the standards-making politics that was peculiar to service-oriented standards. If you are curious about the history of SOA and its related standards, you may find this talk to be interesting.

 

 CTOT 31: History of SOA, part 2 [43:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (180)

 CTOT 31: History of SOA, part 2 [55:20m]: Download (53)

 CTOT 31: History of SOA, part 2: Download (73)

 CTOT 31: History of SOA, part 2: Download (93)

In this recording of CTO Tuesdays, the BPMS podcast, Michael Rowley describes how we got here — taking a special look at previous attempts to solve some core development problems. Whatever your interest: SOA, BPM, application development, even just a passing historical curiosity, you will want to watch this (and future) episodes.

 

 CTO Tuesdays #30: SOA , part 1 [50:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (277)

 CTO Tuesdays #30: SOA , part 1 [50:32m]: Download (78)

 CTO Tuesdays #30: SOA , part 1: Download (144)

 CTO Tuesdays #30: SOA , part 1: Download (111)

We are very pleased to announce that, once again, ActiveVOS BPMS grew substantially in Q2 2010. BPM users around the world are looking for a new kind of BPMS — one that is easier to master and use. And they are finding it in ActiveVOS. The attached press release has the details of the BPMS’s growing momentum.

 Active Endpoints posts record sales in Q2 2010: Download (142)

OK, OK…I know. The pun on SOAP and soap opera is a little much. But doesn’t the SOA world feel like a never-ending, overwrought daytime TV drama?

I mean, c’mon. Nobody can decide if SOA is dead or alive…if it’s a product (or set of products) or if it’s JBOI (just a bunch of ideas, a pun on “JBOD.” I just can’t help myself.).

So, starting tomorrow on CTO Tuesdays, the BPM podcast, Michael Rowley will begin another “miniseries” within the larger podcast that begins with the very basics of SOA and builds over time to paint a complete picture of this much discussed and often misunderstood development approach. We intend this as a primer for both new and expert users and we are excited that the recurring SOA topics will expand CTO Tuesdays’ regular line-up of BPM technology talks.

Register for CTO Tuesdays at http://www.activevos.com/ctot and, as always, you can return to this blog for replays. But we hope you can join us live because we expect the discussion after Michael’s presentation on these topics to be very lively and we hope to have you join in the discussion.

If you’ve been attending the live recordings of CTO Tuesdays, our BPM podcast, and/or watching the replays, you know that we have stuck to our knitting for the most part: detailed technical discussions of BPM technology.

Starting with last week’s CTO Tuesdays and continuing with the episode posted below, we have increased our range to crucial technical decisions for BPM users which may have very long-term effects.

We are, to put it bluntly, very concerned that the marketplace is receiving — and accepting — incorrect information about the real relationship between BPEL and BPMN 2.0. Last week, Michael Rowley dispelled this myth in the abstract. This week, Michael has gone further: he actually shows what a two-toolset, two-engine BPMS environment with only a fig-leaf of integration looks like, using Oracle’s BPM Suite 11g and SOA Suite 11g as the poster children.

Yes, Oracle is a competitor. And yes, we have a “dog in the hunt,” as they say. Therefore, for sure, we have an opinion.

None of that undoes the fact that users should consider alternative points of view — views based, as we attempt to do, on the exact text and meaning of the BPMN 2.0 specification. And the fact that we have an opinion — and a product based on that belief — doesn’t undo the fact that much of the argument that BPMN should execute directly and that BPEL is passe is as self-serving as anything we may say.

So, I urge you to watch the replay of CTO Tuesdays attached to this post and to consider the alternative arguments we make. We’re not going to convince everybody, but we truly believe that the people who do consider their long-term BPMS strategy will find that BPMN as notation with BPEL execution is the better alternative.

 

 CTO Tuesdays #29: Oracle: BPMN and BPEL [41:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (304)

 CTO Tuesdays #29: Oracle: BPMN and BPEL [41:20m]: Download (78)

 CTO Tuesdays #29: Oracle: BPMN and BPEL [41:20m]: Download (260)

 CTO Tuesdays #29: Oracle: BPMN and BPEL: Download (137)

BPM practitioners emphasize collaboration in the design and development of process applications.

Among the many benefits of using a BPMS to manage collaboratively designed processes are that the BPMS has abundant knowledge about those processes.

Take that data…couple it with the end user’s awareness of the process (because he or she helped design the automated process) and you have possibly the richest source of information imaginable for reporting and visualization.

In this webinar replay, you can see how the ActiveVOS BPMS uses Actuate BIRT to deliver integrated reporting. And, you will learn how it is possible to put even greater control of reporting and analysis directly into the hands of the same users who designed an organization’s automated processes.

 BPMS and BI: Better decision-making [76:31m]: Download (238)

 

 BPMS and BI: Better decision-making [76:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (214)

 BPMS and BI: Better decision-making [76:31m]: Download (94)

 BPMS and BI: Better decision-making: Download (138)

If you follow Active Endpoints and ActiveVOS on the web and/or in social media, you know we aren’t timid about…well…anything. We try hard, however, to make sure that as we forcefully make our points we are backing them up not just with emotion (a remarkably clarifying attribute often missing vendors’ discussions of technology) but also with hard facts.

You can see the very best of that loud-but-authentic aesthetic at work in episode 28 of CTO Tuesdays, the BPM podcast.

For too long — and, frankly, for reasons that mystify me — some voices have spoken of a “conflict” between BPMN and BPEL. It has always seemed to me that those points of view — that BPMN 2.0 is somehow a “successor” or “replacment” for BPEL –  have an agenda that’s more about their preferred results in the marketplace than about the “best” or the “right” thing for users. IOW, politicking is at play.

But, as we all know, in politics, negative campaigning works. “BPEL is dead;” “BPMN 2.0 execution obviates BPEL.” These misstatements have gained far more attention than they deserve. They have escalated to the level of myth — or worse, conventional wisdom — both of which can have lives very separate from reality.

Our response: BPMN 2.0 is better with BPEL execution for users for a plethora of reasons. Far from dead, BPEL’s fundamental mistake of not specifying a visual notation is cured by BPMN 2.0. And BPMN 2.0 achieves its highest likelihood of success when coupled with BPEL execution.

Still, the myth that these two crucial standards are in conflict persists. Watch this podcast replay to see and hear Michael Rowley debunk these myths — passionately and accurately.

And be sure to join us next week for episode 29, titled “Oracle’s misguided approach to BPMN and BPEL” for even more myth-busting. Register at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

 

 CTO Tuesdays #28: BPEL BPMN myths [56:26m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (156)

 CTO Tuesdays #28: BPEL BPMN myths [56:26m]: Download (39)

 CTO Tuesdays #28: BPEL BPMN myths [56:26m]: Download (222)

 CTO Tuesdays #28: BPEL BPMN myths: Download (90)

Every once in a while I find someone repeating the common myth that BPMN and BPEL are in conflict – that you have to choose one or the other. The most recent place I saw this was in Tom Baeyens’ rebuttal to my criticism of his microkernel-like approach to BPM engine development for Activiti. In that article he references an article by William Vambenepe that shows a completely invalid example of a conflict. I will show the mistake made there, but before I do I’d like to make a more important point on this subject:

BPMN 2.0 Complete Conformance can only be claimed by an engine if the engine also supports the BPEL Process Execution Semantics Conformance Type.

The phrases in bold are the names of conformance classes in the latest public draft of the BPMN 2.0 standard specification. The conformance section of the specification defines multiple conformance types; one of which is the “BPEL Process Execution Semantics Conformance Type”, which defines how to use BPEL to execute a standard BPMN model. The last BPMN conformance type is called “complete conformance” and it also requires support for BPEL.

So, back to the article that Tom Baeyens’ linked to when he claimed that that “the translation step from BPMN to BPEL is very problematic to say the least.”

As it turns out, William Vambenepe misunderstood the semantics of the BPMN construct that was supposedly in conflict with BPEL. He references this snippet of BPMN:

But he describes it this way:

The customer quote can be reviewed by the region manager, the country manager or the VP of sales. At least one of them must review the quote. More than one may review the quote.

He then goes on the show how hard it is to represent the at-least-one requirement in BPEL. The problem is, the above BPMN snippet has no at-least-one semantic.

Here is what the BPMN 2.0 specification says about the inclusive gateway: “each path is considered to be independent, all combinations of the paths may be taken, from zero to all. However, it should be designed so that at least one path is taken.”

This means it has the exact same semantics as BPEL’s concept of conditional links out of an activity: any subset can be followed, including none.

People also sometimes claim that the problem comes from the fact that BPMN is unstructured while BPEL is structured. Actually, the problem is that some tools don’t know about the free-form style that is permitted in BPEL. BPEL supports both structured constructs and unstructured flows. Oracle BPEL Process Manager, for example, does not show the links in unstructured flows (no arrows), so they are basically worthless in that tool, but the standard does allow them and ActiveVOS supports them fully.

So, are there any processes that can be represented in BPMN that are difficult or impossible to map to BPMN? Yes, there is a restriction in BPEL against cycles in flows that make it difficult to represent interleaved loops in standard BPEL (although I haven’t actually seen an example of this pattern in a post about the mismatch between the two languages). However, this restriction in BPEL is not is fundamental to the language. Active Endpoints has implemented this simple extension that removes that restriction and we encourage all BPEL engines to also support the elimination of that restriction.

Let me finish by quoting the first two paragraphs of the BPMN 2.0 specification. Note especially the second paragraph.

1. Scope

The Object Management Group (OMG) has developed a standard Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). The primary goal of BPMN is to provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users, from the business analysts that create the initial drafts of the processes, to the technical developers responsible for implementing the technology that will perform those processes, and finally, to the business people who will manage and monitor those processes. Thus, BPMN creates a standardized bridge for the gap between the business process design and process implementation.

Another goal, but no less important is to ensure that XML languages designed for the execution of business processes, such as WSBPEL (Web Services Business Process Execution Language), can be visualized with a business-oriented notation.

Clearly the specification writers see no conflict between BPMN and BPEL.

Episode 26 of CTO Tuesdays, the BPM podcast, is a must see.

Michael Rowley discusses how WS-HumanTask, coupled with capabilities provided by JSON and AJAX make it possible to eliminate presentation tier services on application servers for worklist management and process initiation in BPMSs.

It’s a look into how the browser, courtesy of AJAX techniques, has become so powerful for presentation logic that it has obviated the need for extra server-side work. While that may not be the latest news, what is fascinating is the application of these capabilities to BPM — and the inside look at the protocol enabled by the move of presentation logic to the client.

A note: I had a problem with the recoding of this podcast. The bad news is for the first couple of minutes, you’ll hear me give my welcome and introduction to the webinar, but you won’t see my PowerPoint slides. The good news is, once Michael begins his talk, you will see everything perfectly.

Update: During the Q&A in this episode, a user asks about parsing JSON on the server side. One of our engineers, PJ, heard that question and offers this answer:

Here’s a link to the JSON specs and libs and links to for parsing in Java, C, C++, ASP, PHP, etc.: http://json.org/

In ActiveVOS, you do not need to parse JSON because it is automatically converted to XML by the ActiveVOS engine and passed into the Receive (or onEvent) activity in your process. So, in ActiveVOS, one works with XML using XQuery & XPath.

For those using REST based services and want to parse JSON or respond with JSON, they can use the following extension functions:abx:jsonToXml(jsonStr) -> returns XML element
abx:xmlToJson(xmlElement) -> return JSON string

For more information, in ActiveVOS’s Expression dialog picklist, see Functions->BPEL->ActiveVOS->JSON

PJ also notes that we have documentation on using JSON in ActiveVOS at http://www.activevos.com/dev/sdks/XML-JSON-Binding/docs/Part1-ActiveVOS-XML-JSON-API.html and sample code in our SDKs at http://www.activevos.com/developers-sdks.php.

Thanks, PJ.

 

 CTO Tuesdays #26: Eliminating the presentation tier [44:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (244)

 CTO Tuesdays #26: Eliminating the presentation tier [44:00m]: Download (48)

 CTO Tuesdays #26: Eliminating the presentation tier [44:00m]: Download (254)

 CTO Tuesdays #26: Eliminating the presentation tier: Download (148)

Wir freuen uns, den ersten Teil unserer deutschsprachigen Video-Podcast-Reihe – Geschäftsprozessmanagement (BPM) mit ActiveVOS – präsentieren zu können. Die Demonstration wurde von unserem deutschsprachigen Partner iTransparent GmbH entworfen und erfolgreich durchgeführt.

Der Video-Podcast gliedert sich in drei Teile:
1. Übersicht über die Einsatzmöglichkeiten von ActiveVOS
2. Demonstration der BPMS-Kernfunktionalitäten (Live-Demo)
3. Frage und Antworten

Für die vereinfachte Wiedergabe bieten wir vier verschiedene Multimediaformate an. Falls Sie ein iPhone, iPod touch und/oder iPad besitzen, empfehlen wir den Download des mv4-Formats. Alternativ steht das Video selbstverständlich auch als Flash-Datei, bzw. WMV für die Wiedergabe im Windows Media Player 9 zur Verfügung. Die Folien der Präsentation können zusätzlich zu den einzelnen Videos als PDF heruntergeladen werden.

 Deutschsprachige Demonstration von ActiveVOS [38:42m]: Download (254)

 

 Deutschsprachige Demonstration von ActiveVOS [38:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (238)

 Deutschsprachige Demonstration von ActiveVOS [38:42m]: Download (33)

 Deutschsprachige Demonstration von ActiveVOS: Download (94)

Correlation sets in BPEL allow designers to manage asynchronous conversations in their business processes. Correlations sets are both a simple idea and very useful. By design, BPEL engines can manage a wide range of situations automatically, as we explored in CTOT #5: Engine-managed correlations. But what can designers and developers do when things get more complicated?

That’s what we’ll explore  on CTO Tuesdays for Tuesday, May 4, 2010. We’ll be discussing more complicated correlation examples and offer tips and techniques for using BPEL correlation to support a very wide range of processes.

Please join us at noon ET, 9am PT and 16:00 GMT. You can register to watch the podcast live and participate in the Q&A discussion by registering at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

We look forward to seeing you on the podcast.

Well, I’ve been waiting a very long time to write a blog post that mentions that in the ABC TV series “Lost” the famous hatch where the button had to be pushed every 108 minutes had some very retro, old-school tech in it.

After searching and searching, I finally found a still on a fan website from the show’s second season that clearly shows a pair of IBM 3420 mainframe tape drives. Say what?

The Dharma Initiative was using IBM mainframe technology on the island in 1974? What did they need data storage for? Why are the tape drives always empty? What do those cool lights shining up from the bottom of the unit mean? (There were no lights there on the original 3420s.) How come I am the only person to have noticed these antiques in the hatch? (OK, not the only one. But a lot more people are wondering about the meaning of the smoke monster, or whether the Island is Hell — and all I want to know is what OS they were running on these things..MVS, VSE or the progenitor of all things virtual, VM/370.)

Lemme tell ya, these babies could store up to 150MB per 10″ tape reel! And to speed access, the drive “sucked” the tape down into the vacuum columns you can see on either side of the lighted area on the bottom of the tape drive. And, believe it or not, these things “burped” when you unloaded them — which depending on the version of the operating system the mainframe was running, sometimes had to be done manually.

So, what’s all this have to do with the content of CTO Tuesdays #21? Easy: for all the jokes about outdated mainframe(rs) and their never-very-cool reputation compared to the then-nascent PC, mainframes matter. They mattered then…and, to the surprise of no one who’s ever worked on them, they matter today.

On this episode of CTO Tuesdays, Michael Rowley turns the con over to Rob Morris and Dusty Rivers of GT Software, who describe an elegant and practical way of linking everything on a mainframe — CICS transactions, IMS queues, VSAM keyed datasets, raw 3270 data streams…you name it — to a modern BPMS like ActiveVOS. This is done via standard web services, using WSDLs to define available mainframe services.

Simply, if you have mainframe technology in your organization (and, frankly if you are in financial services, telecommunications and/or entertainment & media, we’d bet you do) and you want to write business processes that live up to the promise of flexibly integrating both people and systems, you gotta watch this podcast.

 

 CTO Tuesdays #21: Building business processes with mainframe inclusion [51:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (358)

 CTO Tuesdays #21: Building business processes with mainframe inclusion [52:01m]: Download (91)

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 CTO Tuesdays #21: Building business processes with mainframe inclusion: Download (134)