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CTO Tuesdays #34: XPath – The Unsung Hero of Service-Oriented BPM

These industry veterans, who have created and managed both rapidly growing private and public companies, joined the company because of Active Endpoints’ unique vision to deliver affordable, service-oriented BPM in order to take advantage of strong demand in this segment of the large and growing BPM market.

The company continues to show significant traction, confirming customers want an alternative to traditional, complex and expensive BPMS’s. For example, revenues grew over 100% in the 1st half 2010 compared to the 1st half of 2009. In addition, the customer base continues to expand in all geographic regions and industries, including Telecommunications (Tele2), Media and Entertainment (itfc), Government (Naval Research Labs), and Financial Services/Insurance (Desjardins General Insurance Group).

Download the Active Endpoints press release below for more details.

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Active Endpoints Significant Growth Attracts Industry Veterans to Executive Team and Board of Directors

Contrary to many of the APIs that call themselves REST-based, REST means more than using HTTP GET to call the service and getting plain XML documents back as results. The talk describes the five key principals of REST, including the most important one, which is called HATEOAS. It is an interesting principal that works well for the Web, but it is antithetical to design-time type checking. In fact the REST style is, in general, in conflict with any kind of design-time typing (Roy Fielding refers to typing as “out-of-band” information that creates a tight coupling between client and server).

However, design-time typing is just part of a well-defined service contract and good service contracts are one of the most important characteristics of a service-oriented architecture. I describe this more fully in the talk and also describe the critical value of design-time typing for BPM. I also show how fragile business processes become when they have to depend on REST.

You can view the talk using one of the formats below or just look at the slides (the PDF at the bottom).

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CTO Tuesdays #33: Is REST Right for BPM?

• 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.

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CTO Tuesdays #32: BPM Standards Update

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CTO Tuesdays #31: SOA — from concept to SOAP opera, part 2

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CTO Tuesdays #30: SOA — from concept to SOAP opera, part 1

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.

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Next on “CTO Tuesdays:” SOA – from concept to SOAP opera

If that’s happening in your enterprise, it’s a real shame. Watch the replay of this webinar in which Neil and Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley make a business and technology argument for linking BPM and SOA initiatives in your organization. It’s a compelling case…and one we hope you will consider adopting in your organization.

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BPM and SOA: making the right connections

Originally recorded on March 25, 2010, this webinar explains what a digital business is and describes the technological approaches that are possible to achieving digital processes using SOA and BPM. A demonstration of the ActiveVOS BPMS is given to illustrate some of the concepts of a digital business. A stimulating Q&A with attendees follows.

There are multiple formats attached to this post, including a Flash version that can be streamed from the blog.

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VOSibilities podcast #46: SOA, BPM and building your digital business

First, lets assume that you are convinced of the value of BPEL. You see that it is a great high-level language for creating business processes and orchestrating services. Its service-centric approach is simpler and better for long-term manageability and reuse than other approaches to business process management. It is an accepted OASIS standard with multiple vendor implementations, so investments in BPEL processes are not tied to a single vendor and you can find people who already know the language without having to train them from scratch.

But if you are convinced you want BPEL, why should you care about BPMN? There are two main reasons:

1) To get the value of a standard notation;

2) To improve collaboration with a wide variety of stakeholders in the process, since BPMN is a significant simplification over existing notations used for BPEL.

When WS-BPEL 2.0 was standardized, the OASIS Technical Committee chose not to standardize a graphical notation for it. This was unfortunate, since no one creates a business process by writing BPEL in XML, which is the only standardized representation. Every vendor, and every BPEL developer, creates their processes using a graphical representation, but that representation is different for every tool.

And the notations used by these tools haven’t really been very good. They typically provide a one-to-one correspondence between control flow constructs in BPEL and things on the canvas. However, if you use the BPMN notation, it shows a notation that can mostly be understood without any knowledge of BPEL or even BPMN for that matter (as long as the labels are chosen carefully).

Let me make both of these points with the help of a trivial process example. Take a look at the BPMN representation of a process that I’ll call the “Question” process.

(Click on each image to see a larger version)

It is trivial to follow what is going on, especially if you know the standard notation. You can’t tell by looking at this diagram, but I’ve used two different BPEL mechanisms for getting to the next activity. I use a BPEL link to get from “Receive Q” to the first diamond (the beginning of the BPEL if statement). I use a BPEL sequence to get from the second diamond (the end of the if) to the “Record Answer” activity.

The user who is looking at the graphical representation of the process doesn’t need to know about the distinction between these two mechanisms, so the diagram doesn’t show a difference. The developer may want to know about the difference, so ActiveVOS highlights them differently on mouse-over and shows them differently in the “process outline view”, but that isn’t really important for today’s discussion.

What is important is how different the process is represented in different tools due to the fact that no notation had been standardized. I’ll show what this process looks like in three different BPEL process designers.

Here is how ActiveVOS would represent this process in previous versions of the product (or using the optional “classic” style in 7.0):

Here is how the Eclipse BPEL Designer represents it:

And, here is how the designer for Oracle’s BPEL Process Manager represents it:

In all three of these representations, each of the paths through the if statement are represented by a bounding box. The problem with this representation is that nested if statements can result in so many nested bounding boxes that it is hard to follow what is going on. BPMN simply has arrows through each path and the paths merge back into a single control flow at a gateway diamond.

Also notice the differences in the handling of links vs. sequences. Both ActiveVOS classic and Eclipse represent sequences with their own bounding boxes, then any arrow that is a direct child of a sequence box is known to belong to the sequence, rather than being a real link. Eclipse also draws the links in different color. The extra sequence icon and corresponding bounding box just interferes with the ability for non-technical users to follow what is going on in the process.

Oracle’s designer is odd in this respect. Sequences are not shown in a bounding box, so they don’t clutter up the control flow (a good thing in my opinion), but links aren’t shown at all! There is a link from the “Receive_Q” activity to the if statement, but there isn’t any representation of it on the diagram. It shows the “Receive_Q” and the if as if they happen in parallel. You have to look into the properties of “Receive_Q” to discover that it has an outgoing link, and further rummaging to find out where it goes.

The BPMN representation is, by far, the easiest version of this small process to understand. The process illustrates just three constructs whose representation is simpler with BPMN than with other approaches: ifs, sequences and links. The other BPEL constructs are generally as easy or easier for non-technical users to understand than previous approaches.

But, as valuable as the improvement in readability may be, the greater value that BPMN brings to be BPEL is probably consistency. Having different tools represent similar constructs in such different ways is detrimental to one of the key values in having a standard: skills portability. With a common notation, people will be able to carry their knowledge of how to understand and work with standards-based business processes between vendor tools. It will also create a greater incentive for people to learn these technologies and for schools to teach them. After all, people aren’t usually to thrilled about investing a lot of energy into learning proprietary technologies, and no school really wants to be teaching proprietary technologies.

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Why use BPMN for BPEL?

I’ll bet that it felt like a momentous achievement to get a group of very well-known bloggers, analysts and technologists to agree on a “manifesto” for services-oriented architecture (SOA).

Imagine the group-think of it all: a bunch of people with widely-varying views came together and produced….yet another statement. I imagine the camaraderie and group hugs that must have accompanied this effort resulted in repeated choruses of Kumbaya…or at least a serious drinking party to celebrate the achievement. (Guess which we like better.)

OK, OK…I know there’s no reason to be snide. And, yes, I realize that the manifesto is unobjectionable..that criticizing it is the equivalent of dissing motherhood or sunshine or quarks.

But the big problem for SOA — which is “dead” one moment and “strategic” the next — is that it doesn’t need yet another descriptive manifesto…it needs manifestation. Consider the definitions of manifesto and manifestation. Manifesto is about intention. Manifestation is about materialization. One is talk. The other is about something real.

And high-faultin’ talk has been SOA’s problem for…well…forever. While it’s good fun to have an ole-time, intellectual techno-debate about this aspect of implementing SOA versus that technique for doing it, the consistent response to SOA from legions of developers has been, “We just don’t care. And, not only don’t we care…since you are making this so hard, we’re gonna stay right where we are doing things as we have always done them. Good luck with your SOA thing.”

What happens when industry thought-leaders run smack into the biggest wall of them all: developer resistance? They talk some more. Consultants build big engagements to explain to management how to get around developer resistance. Vendors who bought one of everything and lumped it all together as “SOA” have made implementing their stacks so expensive and complicated they advocate “centers of excellence” — that is, internal lobbying groups — who try to explain it all to the average development team using…guess what…still more words.

In short, SOA needs fewer words and more products mere mortals can use.

How about we manifest SOA in products so that it’s invisible? So that you can do the right thing without knowing the first thing about SOA? Do civil engineers demand that we understand the properties of asphalt before we drive on it? Must you ascertain the precise chemical composition of your dinner before you eat it? No, we just drive home at night and stick a fork into the main course. We don’t think twice about it.

That’s what SOA needs to be (and what we think ActiveVOS achieves). As an industry, we need to take what we know, stop talking about it and scaring people off — and build it into shrinkwrap-like product that have people doing the right things automatically.

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SOA needs manifestation….not manifesto

We are pleased to present the latest episode of Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect Analyst Insight. This time Dana talks with noted industry analyst Dave Linthicum about his new book on SOA and cloud computing.

We hope you enjoy this fascinating interview. Also, in case you’re interested, you can also access a white paper Dave recently wrote on SOA development tools here.

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BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #45: Dave Linthicum’s new book on SOA and cloud computing

Scary big. That is how big Oracle is in middleware. After bragging that they had beat BEA to be #2 in the middleware market, they bought them. Then, with the acquisition of Sun, Oracle has control over the underlying technologies of Java and Java EE, plus the primary open-source challenge to their database dominance. Of course, IBM has also done its share of gobbling up middleware companies, so between them, the number of products and acquisitions has become overwhelming. We made exactly that point last week at Oracle “Open”World by dressing up actors as prisoners “shackled” to Oracle SOA Suite (Check out the hi-jinks here, here and here.)

Up to now, enterprises have typically had one choice that drove most other technology choices in the data center: .Net or Java. If you chose .Net, then you are a Microsoft shop and you’ve decided that the advantages of living in a single vendor world outweigh the disadvantages of being tied to that one vendor. However, if you chose to go with Java, you probably did so because you wanted to then live in the world of standards-based technologies, where for each technology purchase, you could separately evaluate products from a number of competing vendors.

But now, with much of the Java middleware world being absorbed into one of two vendors, the era of having a choices for each purchase is coming to an end. Instead, there will be just one big decision. Do you want to be a Microsoft shop, an Oracle shop or an IBM shop? All other decisions will flow from that initial decision. This is because the development teams in each of those companies will naturally be forced to give a high priority to getting any new software to work with existing software from the same company. Getting it to work with the other company’s software will be a “goal,” but as someone deeply involved in the development of software products, trust me when I tell you those are the kinds of goals that tend to slip as the ship date of any product nears.

Does it matter? Isn’t three enough? Yes, it matters. And no, three isn’t enough. Actually, the real problem isn’t the small number of choices; it is that the switching costs are just too high. If there were three good choices for each purchase, that wouldn’t be so bad. But when you are virtually locked into a single vendor for each new purchase once you’ve started down the road of buying from them, then it is a real problem. The lack of competition for individual products removes critical competitive pressures from individual product lines, so the products grow to become heavy, badly integrated, expensive beasts.

And, if enterprises have to pay more for lower quality software on their servers, this affects everyone. The ultimate consumer pays for the more expensive software in higher prices, but they pay even more for the lower productivity that comes from software that is hard to use, hard to manage, and unresponsive to the needs of the business.

We get up in the morning and think about what we can do to make ActiveVOS the antithesis of the bloatware from Oracle and IBM.

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The Oracle is Getting Big Around the Middle

“BPM suites that focus on business users, they don’t get technical enough,” said Alex Neihaus, VP of marketing at Active Endpoints. “They become islands of computing and sit off by themselves. And with BPMS for architects and developers, the level of cost and complexity is beyond the level of what most people are willing to undertake.”

This “third way” between the cost and complexity of stacks from Oracle and IBM and the unfulfilled promises of Lombardi and Pegasystems to integrate easily across the enterprise are why we believe we have become so popular among development teams. Looking past old buying habits and the new politics of “end user” BPM, our customers are seeking great technology at an affordable price that can be used to create integrated processes as that are themselves services.

You can read Rob’s entire blog post here.

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SOA Talk blog covers ActiveVOS 7

As we promised in part 1 of of our discussion on the new features in the ActiveVOS 7 BPMS, we are delighted to post part 2 of a conversation among me (Alex Neihaus), Luc Clément and Michael Rowley. In this second podcast, Michael and Luc cover topics that are of interest to enterprise architects, developers and operations staff. Topics include continuous development (including support for the open-source Hudson project) and new features in the BPMN designer that improve productivity and operational enhancements.

We hope you enjoy this podcast.

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VOSibilities podcast #38: ActiveVOS 7.0, part 2

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Active Endpoints announces ActiveVOS 7.0

Today, we are pleased to make available a new white paper by well-known industry analyst Sandra Rogers which offers additional insight into this very question.

Here’s an excerpt from the paper:

Organizations are discovering that the use of more visual and self-documenting solutions can better ensure that requirements are commonly understood and agreed upon, and measure if certain business goals met. Utilizing BPMSs like ActiveVOS that help individuals capture current and future state, that are easier to use and allow for multiple and concurrent cycles while designing and enhancing business processes, can greatly impact overall results. The use of such technology that provides deeper transparency into one’s processes, enables the sharing of best practices, and allows business stakeholders building degrees of freedom in adjust application and process parameters can help bring all parties into further alignment.

We hope you enjoy Sandy’s paper.

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New white paper on business and IT alignment

Joe McKendrick has revisited the debate about the relationship of BPM and SOA by commenting on JP Morgenthal’s assertion that SOA and BPM initiatives should be kept separate.

With all due respect to JP, we think he’s got it wrong. BPM and SOA do need to be reconciled.

JP seems to have fallen into a trap that confuses the need to achieve two complimentary goals with the need to combine the initiatives that strive for those goals.

So sure, the initiative to introduce a business process culture into an organization should be separate from an initiative that drives toward a service-oriented architecture, but both initiatives have to be able to succeed. Those that merely view BPM as the killer application that justifies purchasing stacks of “SOA” middleware are missing the key “BPM” value proposition. Conversely, pure-play BPMers risk building impenetrable fortresses of locked in process that can’t be shared/reused.

In JP’s world, the benefits of BPM will not materialize for either the business which is trying to rationalize work or by the architecture groups trying to rationalize infrastructure supporting that work. In order for them both to succeed, any application that is developed with a BPMS must introduce its new functionality as a collection of services.

Implementing “BPM” does not suddenly provide an excuse to intertwine business logic with presentation logic. Reusable services must be created in order for the long-term success of the enterprise and its BPM initiatives. BPM must be inclusive – not a fiefdom.

Workflow, human interaction, reports, event processing — all need to be incorporated in a service-based architecture if we’re ever to get to better business (i.e. BPM) and IT (i.e. infrastructure) alignment. In other words, BPM itself needs to be service-oriented.

Without a major course correction in current BPM-SOA approaches (with BPM as a consumer of services only) the respective visions of BPM and SOA stakeholders will not materialize. A service-oriented BPM has a much better chance of yielding an outcome where BPM and SOA can actually share and deliver on a common vision. Claiming, as JP does, that SOA and BPM “are not – repeat not – related” gives the incorrect impression that people who are creating business processes don’t need to care about SOA and that people creating services don’t need to care about BPM.

Neither is true.

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BPM and SOA belong together

As an enterprise architect, you have a tough job. Business people do not want to be “governed.” They see no need to use the infrastructure that you have carefully put in place. The more rigid you are, the more likely they will find a way to circumvent. Even if you find out they have ignored your policies, you are frequently not empowered to make them use the infrastructure. Further, while you know that building standards-based/service-oriented applications is clearly the best practice, SOA is probably not an “official” direction. Business users can still complain to their vice presidents that middleware is an impediment. Every day you are either awarded a medal or put in front of a firing squad.

The trend towards “the business” developing and running business process management systems is reflective of this destructive mindset of going around IT. We all know that they can be successful with “happy path” workflow modeling. But do we really want business users, with their own servers, managing and changing mission critical applications? Of course not. Islands of BPMS that exist outside of IT will eventually fail because of all the necessary exception handling, the effort required to get the data and deployment right, system-to-system integration and the lack of rigor around the software development life cycle.

The answer is a BPMS that lets the developer stay in their current tools, lifecycle, etc.  It is a given that, as vendors, we must lower the level of pre-requisites to allow non-programmers to do serious modeling, as well as build, test, deploy and optimize processes. Further, we must use collaboration diagrams to work with the more technical of business analysts so that they can sketch out requirements, modify/edit forms and storyboard. A portion of these analysts may even be able to adapt a process making quick changes to application templates.

As an enterprise architect, start thinking about creating a “federated” BPMS or orchestration layer in your architecture that facilitates the creation of business services. ESBs may be useful but are frequently not necessary and certainly should not be mandated. A BPMS should be able to run anywhere without infrastructure dependencies. The standards are there and becoming well established: BPMN for modeling, BPEL for executing business processes, WSDL for SOA services, WS-HumanTask for task management and XSD for data representation.

Business Process Management and SOA are not precise games. There will always be a balancing act to deliver the benefits. Don’t try to boil the ocean. Pragmatic adoption will allow you to both keep the business happy and support the long term goals of your CIO. ActiveVOS makes it easy. You can download a free, 30-day trial.  We have a rich set of content on our website that will quickly get you started but if you need help, our technical support people are standing by.

Don’t wake up a year or two from now only to find the company’s core applications running under desks in every fifth office.  You will never get them out!

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BPMS that an enterprise architect can embrace

I’ve just run across a blog I wanted to give a “shout out” to. On Vijay’s Narayanan’s Software Use in the Real World blog, there’s a variety of good technical info, an interesting podcast and some good advice for making some of the more complicated concepts in software resuse comprehensible.

It looks like Vijay only started blogging in March. I hope he finds the time to keep it up. As anyone who’s blogged consistently can tell you, it takes a lot of work and dedication to keep a blog “alive” and interesting.

With 90 days or so under his belt, Vijay might be wondering if it’s worth it. So, head on over to his blog, check out his posts and podcast and help convince him to stick with it. We can all benefit from more voices on good software design, especially from people who are consuming BPM systems in applications they develop in their daily work.

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Check out the “Software Reuse in the Real World” blog

We are very pleased to include a podcast produced by Peter Schooff of eBizQ in our podcast feed. In this short 6:30 minute podcast, Peter interviews our own Michael Rowley on why a good BPMS (business process management system) needs to include both services and human tasks. When a standards-based way to include people activities in a BPM application is available, developing end-to-end, integrated applications is easier and faster. We believe that every BPMS must deliver both human tasks and machine (or services) integration to be a real solution to the challenge of creating BPM applications.

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eBizQ Podcast: BPM That Includes Both Services and People: A Talk with Active Endpoints

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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

Ann Thomas Manes, vice president and research director for application platform strategies at Burton Group, has created quite a stir in her recent post where she says that although the term “SOA” is dead, the requirement for service-oriented architecture is stronger than ever. In this lively podcast, Dana Gardner interviews a panel of industry luminaries to help calibrate the life span of SOA and to expand on Ms. Manes’ position on SOA being under significant pressure, in particular due to today’s abysmal economic climate. Panelists include: Anne Thomas Manes; Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum; Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research; Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and prolific blogger on ZDNet and ebizQ; Dave Linthicum, founder of Linthicum Group and; JP Morgenthal, senior analyst at Burton Group.

Have a listen to this podcast and determine for yourself whether SOA is dead or alive. Whichever camp you belong to, we hope you’ll agree that ActiveVOS is truly an affordable, 100% standards-based, all-in-one BPMS that delivers “architecturally correct” SOA-based applications easily and quickly, empowering you to achieve your services goals today.

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BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #36: SOA – dead or alive?

We hope you enjoy the recordings and that you will take advantage of the fully-configured, supported trial version of ActiveVOS which includes the application for both learning and for use in your BPM applications. Many, many different techniques are demonstrated in this application, which we think makes it an excellent way to begin creating your own business process management applications.

There are many learning materials associated with the demo. This announcement gives you the best route through all off this exciting information and code. But, if you can’t wait to start, you begin with the customized ActiveVOS trial download.

There are two files enclosed in this post. The first, an iPod-formatted .m4v, which will be automatically provided to iTunes subscribers of our podcast feed, is about 144MB. The second, a DivX-encoded .avi, is about 476MB in size.

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VOSibilities podcast #26: “Lifting the Hood” on a BPM Application

The press release and accompanying white paper are attachments to this post.

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Commodities Trader Trafigura Redesigns Core Systems with ActiveVOS

This Wednesday, January 21, at Wednesday, January 21 at 2pm ET, 11am PT, 18:00 GMT, we will be presenting a free webinar (register here) in which we will “open the hood” and take a detailed look at a reference BPM and SOA application we call “Vintage Old Stock.” This webinar promises to be an excellent way for you to learn some of the latest techniques for creating BPM applications in a services-based environment.

Our ActiveVOS product manager, Mike Moniz, will detail how this fully featured business process was built using the latest SOA techniques and open standards. At the end of the demo, Mike will be taking your questions.

We encourage you to download a fully-configured version of the application, complete with extensive documentation, as a way to cement the very exciting things you will learn in this webinar.

Once again, here’s the registration link. We hope you can join us.

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Webinar: Lifting the Hood on BPM

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Active Endpoints Reports Record Growth in 2008

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.

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Active Endpoints Announces New Learning Tool for Java Developers

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. 

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Giving SOA terminology a nip/tuck

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?

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Incremental SOA

In this final podcast of the year, Dana Gardner interviews key analysts for their 2009 predictions for enterprise IT, SOA, cloud and business intelligence. The panel also discusses the economy and the Obama administration’s impact on IT.

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BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #35: 2009 predictions

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

Dana Gardner interviews a panel of experts on the impact cloud computing will have on large, established IT vendors. A must-listen if you want to want to learn more about the next big trend in technology.

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BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #34: cloud computing

‘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

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.

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BPMN? BPEL? Both? What’s right for a process execution standard?

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Dana Gardner: Active Endpoints beefs up visual orchestration system

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

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.

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Active Endpoints ships ActiveVOS 6.0.2

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.”

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VOSibilities podcast #25: Customizing a BPEL4People and WS-Human Task client worklist manager

I’ve been at the SOA World conference this week — in fact, I am writing this during the wrap-up panel discussion — and so I’ve been away from the blog.

But I couldn’t let the week go without reminding readers to visit www.soaholiday.com to register for our contest. We’ve had a great response to the contest, and we encourage you to join in. It’s fun and easy. Do a good thing for yourself — learn BPMN, BPEL and SOA techniques in the best visual orchestration system — and do a good thing for your organization by helping it improve in fundamental ways.

On the fun side, I thought I’d share this humorous, clever ditty on services-based thinking from Tony Baer. I’d sent him a message announcing the Bring SOA Home for the Holidays contest, and this is what I got back:

Wow, never realized you could use BPEL to orchestrate a service-oriented Christmas carol.

Of course, the design question is how many services can be exposed from a single carol;
should the entire carol be exposed as a coarse granular service into which it could be
orchestrated as part of an employee onboarding process at Santa’s North Pole Workshop,
or do we get more granular and expose services at the chorus and refrain levels, at which point
one could literally sample bits and pieces into a hip hop mashup?

For the answers to those questions, Santa will need to augment to his team of elves
an EA and a business process architect. They must be prepared to wear green and be
willing to get shrunken down to 4′ 2″ so they can fit into their elves uniforms, which for the
newly organized Carol Process Architecture & Services (Santa-CPAS) group will also be
equipped with pocket protectors.

I’m off to the nearest mall to sit on Santa’s lap and ask for an elf-sized pocket protector. (-:

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For the SOA cognoscenti: how to build a service-oriented holiday carol

Dana Gardner interviews Todd Biske about his new book on SOA governance and engages an analyst panel of technology experts on the implications for technology of the new administration taking office in Washington next year.

A must-listen.

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BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #33: SOA governance

This podcast episode is a recording of a talkshoe.com call-in conference held on November 12, 2008 with Paul Fremantle of WSO2 plus Michael Rowley and Luc Clement of Active Endpoints. I was honored to moderate the conversation.

Our idea was to invite the Java development community to join our panelists for a technical discussion of SOA and BPM. I think when you listen to this recording, you’ll agree that we had an interesting and thought-provoking discussion. Topics ranged from the question of how we should respond in technology to the economic crisis to a discussion of the different architectural styles represented by SOAP/HTTP and REST.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with talkshoe.com, it’s a service that allows people to conference via phone, web, chat and VoIP — all at once. And, it automatically records the conference so it can be podcast, as we are doing here.

The participation of people in the call, mostly via chat, made the conversation much more spirited.

We plan on doing more of these. Please watch the blog for annoucements of upcoming calls, or you can subscribe to announcements on our talkshoe.com page.

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VOSibilities podcast #24: Community call-in on SOA and BPM with Active Endpoints and WSO2

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

Many thanks to Derek Mathieson of CERN (on the far left here, next to me and two CERN colleagues at JavaOne in May, 2008) who has driven the vision of BPM with ActiveVOS at CERN and who is one of our most valued customers. Also, a shout-out to Mike Kavis for taking the time to tell this great story.

Thank you both, gentlemen.

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Mike Kavis reports on BPM at CERN and its deployment of ActiveVOS

Active Endpoints is very pleased to announce a contest for the 2008 holiday season: Bring SOA Home for the Holidays. Details are in the press release attached to this post. Three winners will receive a very cool Lenovo netbook. (I wish I had one!)

It’s an easy contest to enter: all you have to do is register to download a copy of ActiveVOS at www.soaholiday.com. To win, all you have to do is submit something that shows what you did with your free, supported 30-day trial of ActiveVOS. Complete rules are at the contest mini-site at www.soaholiday.com.

Thanks for entering, and good luck!

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Announcing the “Bring SOA Home for the Holidays” contest

Have you ever wished you could sit back, pop open a beverage of choice and have a stimulating technical discussion about SOA, ESBs and the latest in enterprise application development with the leading experts driving these technologies? A talk with no marketing agenda…no sales pitch…a place to really learn something new without having to separate the chaff from the wheat?

Well, wait no longer. On Wednesday, 12 November, 2008, at 9am ET, 6am PT, 14:00 GMT, Active Endpoints and WSO2 are holding a live, free call-in and online chat conference at http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/31357 in which their technical leaders will discuss the future of SOA development and take questions from attendees. TalkShoe allows people anywhere to participate in a group meeting using call-in phone on landlines or VoIP. Attendees can also use chat to participate in the group discussion. Active Endpoints and WSO2 are hosting this call-in as a way to bridge the gap between our software companies and our users because with today’s social networking technologies, the era of big, remote, you’ll-use-what-we-ship software is over.

Our guests will include:

• Paul Fremantle, CTO, WSO2
• Michael Rowley, Director of Strategy and Technology, Active Endpoints
• Luc Clement, Director of Product Management, Active Endpoints

These three distinguished technologists will discuss any number of topics, including:

• How Java developers can leverage their current skills in the new world of web services
• Why an open-source ESB is a fundamentally smart way to integrate many different services
• What, exactly, is “orchestration” and why do I care about it?

But the real beauty of this call-in show is that the discussion will go wherever the attendees take it. So, please join us with your questions at http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/31357.

How to join a TalkShoe call-in:

Dial this number: +1 724 444 7444 (long distance and/or toll charges apply); then enter this call id when prompted: 31357, then the # key, OR

Go to http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/31357 15 minutes before the start time and a web chat client will automatically start, OR

For VoIP users:

a. Download and install TalkShoe Live Pro here: http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/tscmd/download/1 and search for call id 31357 OR
b. Use any SIP-standard softphone including Gizmo, SJphone, and X-Lite. Skype is not SIP-compliant but you can use SkypeOut to call 724-444-7444 (note: Skype charges for this). The address for Gizmo is 123@66.212.134.192; the address for SJphone and most other VoIP clients is 66.212.134.192.

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Join Active Endpoints and WSO2 for a live community call-in on SOA, BPM, ESBs and more

…we wanted to respond to Bruce’s post with what we believe is important to understand about the differences between BPMN and BPEL and why they are both important.

Bruce believes that BPMN a process model doesn’t have to be just a “business requirements” sketch but – with implementation attributes added by IT — a diagrammatic representation of the executable solution.

That’s great. The issue has to do with those pesky little “implementation attributes”. Bruce seems to imply that they are just little jots and tiddles that are easy to create in the first place, so it would be no big deal if a business had to create something completely different for a different vendor’s runtime. The problem is that implementation details aren’t that simple. They are the details that a machine needs to run a process…and they can’t be fuzzy or imprecise.  Yet BPMN does not standardize the way that data is modeled, declared, accessed and manipulated.

Any collection of files that can be executed is a program. Having some of it represented graphically, doesn’t change that. But a large chunk of the work of that program is not represented graphically. That means that BPMN used for the purposes of executable processes is a programming language, but it is a programming language that doesn’t bother to describe how to declare variables, write assignment statements, evaluate conditionals, or any other work that has to do with data. The only thing that is standardized is the control flow. But if you look at most programs, the control flow is a minority of the work of the program. The rest is data manipulation.

In the world of long-running business processes another important detail that has to be worked out is how to pull appropriate correlation data out of messages in order to route them to the right process, or location within a process. Getting this right is significant work.

Do people really want to have to do all that work, work that is absolutely necessary to get the process to be executable, in a proprietary language? Of course, the answer is no. One of the values of standards is portability — skills portability and actual portability. Portability is never perfect, but if only a fraction of the information necessary to get a process to execute is standardized, then only a fraction of the work reaps the benefits of standardization.

Even for control flow, the transformation into BPEL can be helpful. If you can’t generate BPEL, there is a good chance that you goofed on your process model. I have seen several BPMN process models that clearly don’t do what their authors intended (based on a knowledge of what they were trying to do). In BPMN it is fairly easy to create models with merge conditions that can never be met, or that result in multiple tokens (execution) along a path that the user clearly only intended to be executed once. Generating working BPEL can help to ferret out these problems.

Readers might be interested to listen to a podcast I recently recorded on the relationship between BPEL and BPMN. It’s time we stopped trying to favor one over the other and realized that both are needed, and dependent on each other for success.

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Bruce Silver has the right idea about BPMN and BPEL…but