There are three formats of the webinar attached to this post. For iTunes and iPod touch/iPhone users, an .m4v is available. A Flash file that can be streamed from the blog and/or downloaded is attached and a Windows Media 9 .wmv is also available.

Please remember to register for next week’s CTO Tuesdays at http://www.activevos.com/ctot

Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog

Learn more about ActiveVOS

CTO Tuesdays #15: Using Java with business processes

I’m pleased that my recent disagreement with JP Morgenthal was noticed by Joe McKendrick, on his Service Oriented blog, and by Loraine Lawson at ITBusinessEdge. Now, having set the record straight, we can step back a little and start a more general discussion about SCA and why it’s a powerful new approach for developing applications. Loraine made a few comments in particular that got me thinking more about the value of SCA to a chief architect who is “prioritizing and rationalizing applications from an enterprise perspective.”

Once this architect has prioritized the needs of IT for the enterprise, it is critical that the architect’s development team has the right “tools” to update or create the applications that will meet those enterprise priorities. The development team also wants to improve its ability to maintain the application in the long run. I put the word “tools” in quotes in the previous sentence to emphasize the fact that I am using the word in its most general form. Your programming language is a tool. The design patterns you follow are tools. And, of course, the middleware infrastructure you use is a tool. J.P. is just wrong to assert that SCA will lock you into dependency on a vendor. There is no reason that middleware has to lock you in to a vendor any more than using a programming language locks you into a vendor, but that is only true if the middleware uses…

standards (and the right standards at that). If SCA were just some vendor’s tool that was promising great things, J.P. and everyone else would be right to be skeptical. But it isn’t proprietary, it’s a standard.

There are a few important reasons why this is important. It is always difficult to hire people who are skilled in a vendor’s proprietary technology and any application that depends on the technology is always at risk, since the vendor may choose to “improve” the technology in a direction that is retrograde for you. Or, the vendor could possibly abandon it altogether.

A good middleware standard is like a high-level language. It raises the level of abstraction that developers work in, so they can think about the actual problem being solved instead of fiddling with bits – or SOAP headers.  There are three recent standards that do exactly this: BPEL, BPMN and SCA.  BPEL is a language that is specifically designed around creating and using services, so it is also inherently middleware. Then there is BPMN, which standardizes the notation — the look of the business process on the design canvas — so that developers and non-developers alike can share an understanding of what is going on. And finally there is SCA, which allows developers to create, wire, package and deploy services without having to sweat the details of the numerous WS-* standards for every service that is created or used.  It, like high-level languages, raises the level of abstraction without significantly constraining what a developer can accomplish.

Forcing a development team to avoid recent advances in middleware today would be like having a manager in the 1970’s forcing their developers to program in assembler due to a mistrust of languages like FORTRAN. Productivity would suffer.

Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog

Learn more about ActiveVOS

If SCA is a tool, it is a power tool

A couple of minutes ago, Luc Clément, our product manager extraordinaire, finally found a couple of minutes away from work on our next (killer) release of ActiveVOS to stop in my office and show me something we’ve just posted to our website that I wanted to make sure readers of our blog heard about.

BPM systems are valued for their ability to combine both people and systems in a process. Further, we strongly believe that standards are the correct way to manage human tasks in extended human-machine process workflows. Therefore, ActiveVOS implements WS-Human Task and as part of that implementation, it includes a standard-compliant worklist UI.

Until now, developers could easily customize this worklist UI via XSLT. Now, we have extended that capability to developers working in Java via a Java SDK we call the ActiveVOS WS-Human Task and Identity Service Kit that permits Java developers to easily combine the power of ActiveVOS human task management with a UI of their choosing. Now, developers can use Java along with the UI framework of their choice to interface with the ActiveVOS WS-HT compliant server.

In the SDK, you’ll find everything you need to take advantage of the power of ActiveVOS’s BPMS combined with your favorite RIA framework. Very cool. We hope you enjoy this new capability. If you need a trial of ActiveVOS to test this new feature, please feel free to download it here.

Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog

Learn more about ActiveVOS

Java SDK permits direct access to WS-Human Task interface in ActiveVOS

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?

Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog

Learn more about ActiveVOS

Incremental SOA

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

Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog

Learn more about ActiveVOS

Not your dad’s loan application demo

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.

Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog

Learn more about ActiveVOS

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

Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog

Learn more about ActiveVOS

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

Despite the imposing title, I think you will find the content — especially the lively Q&A at the end of the webinar — very interesting.

Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog

Learn more about ActiveVOS

VOSibilities podcast #10: Webinar replay – How to Create and Orchestrate Services for Your SOA and Web 2.0 Applications

Many of the services developers need to orchestrate are available via JMS and originate and terminate in common systems like MQ Series and JBoss. We believe it’s very important to be inclusive of these transports and to make sure they are able to participate in a first-class way with SOAP-transported services. In short, being “doctrinaire” about how services should communicate with the orchestration system only serves to impede developers who deal with heterogeneous systems as a daily matter of course. A good example of this pragmatism in ActiveVOS is at about 6:00 into the demo when Kim shows how ActiveVOS will automatically detect an incoming message’s format and reply in kind.

I want to thank you all for the feedback we’ve been receiving about this podcast series. We will continue to post a wide variety of content: demo vignettes (help me persuade Kim and our other engineers to burn the midnight oil to create more by downloading and viewing this episode like crazy), product information, audio podcasts and PDF content. Be sure to subscribe to this feed at http://www.vosibilities.com/category/podcast/feed or in iTunes at http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=274122495.

You may have also noticed that when we have video for the feed, I try to post both a larger .avi and an iPod-formatted .m4v or .mp4. They are always the same content, but the .m4v is usually smaller because it’s reduced in resolution to fit iPods. Please feel free to download either or both. Also, as a convenience who visit the blog instead of subscribing to the podcast feed, the .m4v can be played in a Flash player on the blog just by clicking on the image.

Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog

Learn more about ActiveVOS

VOSibilities podcast #8: Kim Pease on using JMS in ActiveVOS to orchestrate web services

Anyway, I was motivated to do this this afternoon because our guys are calling everyone whom we met at JavaOne to follow-up. And just a few minutes ago, Mike Kettering came in to tell me a woman he spoke with had a great time at the party. It was so nice of her to tell Mike that she’d had a good time so long after the party ended.

Frankly, I don’t remember the party very well, but I know I had a blast. (-:

Just click on a thumbnail to see the photos from Flickr. Those big yellow bowls were actually lighted, though you can’t see it in the photos. And most of the other shots showing people palming big snifters are of people enjoying a 40oz cocktail masterpiece.

So, next time we invite you to a pahty, you’re gonna come, right?

Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog

Learn more about ActiveVOS

Pix from Java One

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:

Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog

Learn more about ActiveVOS

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

We are pleased to offer our first audio podcast. Until now, we’ve used our podcast feed to offer videos, webinar replays and news about Active Endpoints in PDF form.

Now, we are going to a more “classic” use of our podcast feed by providing audio interviews with the people inside Active Endpoints who are driving our product and market efforts. I hope to offer regular podcasts that span the gamut of topics: from marketing to technology with everything in between.

Enjoy this inaugural episode with Chris Keller, a founder of Active Endpoints, who I stuck in the “Wayback Machine” and asked a couple of tough historical questions. First, “Why BPEL”? And second, “What lead to the requirement for BPEL4People and WS-Human Task”?

Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog

Learn more about ActiveVOS

VOSibilities podcast #4: Chris Keller on Active Endpoints, BPEL and BPEL4People

There are two files in this post. The first file is formatted for an iPod and can be viewed here on the blog. Please be patient while the podcast downloads into the player. It is also available in our podcast feed (search on “vosibilities” in the iTunes Store to subscribe).

The second, a DivX-encoded AVI file, is significantly larger in size (@460MB) and can be downloaded for more comfortable viewing.

Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog

Learn more about ActiveVOS

VOSibilities podcast #3: BPEL Basics for Java Developers webinar

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

Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog

Learn more about ActiveVOS

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