VOSibilities

We are pleased to post a recording of a webinar originally presented on May 7, 2009 entitled “BPMS for Java Developers.” This webinar, jointly presented by JBoss and Active Endpoints, will introduce Java developers to business process management suites (BPMS) using ActiveVOS and to the JBoss SOA Platform.

There are two files attached to this post. The first is an iPod-formatted .m4v file for our podcast feed subscribers. The second file is a DivX-encoded .avi with slightly larger resolution.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #32: BPMS for Java developers [78:51m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (791)
 VOSibilities podcast #32: BPMS for Java developers [78:50m]: Download (292)

Writing in eBizQ’s SOA in Action blog, Joe McKendrick discusses how Fastenal Corp. is using ActiveVOS in production to revamp to its sales order processing system.

Today, Active Endpoints announced that it has published a white paper authored by noted industry analyst David Linthicum which debunks the idea that SOA development of business process management applications is difficult and expensive. The press release describing the new white paper is attached to this post. You can download the white paper itself here or here. 

 A Call-to-Action for SOA Development: Download (220)

In this new white paper, titled Leveraging Process Configuration within the Context of SOA, noted industry analyst, blogger and podcaster David Linthicum tackles perceptions that developing BPM applications in a services-oriented architecture (SOA) environment has to be difficult and expensive.  

 Leveraging Process Configuration within the Context of SOA: Download (344)

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

Today, we are very pleased and excited to announce ActiveVOS 6.1. The press release with all the details is attached to this post.

To view selected content about the release, visit our What’s New page on our product website. And, don’t forget to listen to Michael Rowley and Luc Clément discuss the themes and objectives for ActiveVOS 6.1 in this podcast.

 Active Endpoints Announces ActiveVOS 6.1: Download (176)

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

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

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

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

 

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

Active Endpoints’ own Michael Rowley joins Dana Gardner’s analyst round table for an update on the BPEL4People standard and the results of the recent activities that are guiding the development of this standard.

 

 BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #37: BPEL4People: Human Tasks in Business Process Applications [47:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (438)
 BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #37: BPEL4People: Human Tasks in Business Process Applications - transcript: Download (112)

Unlike other companies that want to keep everything a big secret until they ship a release, we can’t wait for you to discover the cool new things we’re shipping in the latest release of our BPM product, ActiveVOS.

We plan to have ActiveVOS 6.1 available on March 10, 2009. But for BPM developers and business analysts longing for a simpler, more intelligent, easier-to-use BPM system, there’s no need to keep our new release secret. ActiveVOS 6.1 is precisely what you have been waiting for. And, if the vicissitudes of QA testing cooperate, you can have it next week.

The PDF attached to this post, authored by our Director of Products, Luc Clément and our Director of Strategy and Technology, Michael Rowley, is a great overview of what’s in ActiveVOS 6.1.

Check out the very sophisticated control of in-flight processes via our new “process rewind” capability in ActiveVOS 6.1. And, for those of you who a) know that BPEL is the core language for SOA and b) have thought BPEL is too complex, be sure to read up on how ActiveVOS 6.1 automatically generate BPEL assigns and the WSDL’s necessary to create compelling BPM applications.

 What's New in ActiveVOS 6.1: Download (636)

Today, Active Endpoints announced that well-known government and industry SOA consultant Seros has made ActiveVOS the centerpiece of its offerings. Read the details in the press release attached to this post.

 Active Endpoints Announces Partnership with Seros: Download (225)

This week, WSO2 announced its “Carbon” technology, including a new “business process server.” Some have suggested that we should welcome another BPEL-based BPM server into the market as it demonstrates that the market for standards-based business process servers has grown large enough that new entrants see market-share opportunities.

Maybe another marketing guy might be happy to believe that..but not me. 

Two things bother me. First is the presumption that somehow “open source” solves the cost problem. Because IBM, Oracle and SAP cost millions, open source must be the answer, right?

Wrong. Consider that, in fact, WSO2’s announced pricing for their “BPM server” actually costs more than an ActiveVOS production server over three years. Nobody — and I mean nobody  – can build a business model on “free.”  Software companies have to pay people to survive and support customers. SOA middleware is complex stuff and whether you get a perpetual license and maintenance or open source with “subscription,” you have to pay somehow. The question is how much. And ActiveVOS has the best answer, bar none.

The second problem is the Achilles heel of the SOA and BPM world: the astonishingly misguided belief that customers want to build SOAs from piece parts. C’mon…let’s get past this. Java developers working on BPM want products — not little pieces of carbon-based coal they have to meld together into something resembling a development and deployment environment.

I’ve been at Active Endpoints for a year…and I am still astonished at the disconnect between vendors and customers over this. IBM’s, Oracle’s and, to a lesser extent, SAP’s strategy I understand. They bought and built stuff that was never designed to work together. They have to sell piece parts and make it seem like a virtue. But open source fans have transformed the mistakes of the monoliths into a purported benefit that delivers the same ultimate result: a dumping of middleware product engineering onto the end user developer who never gets to the real BPM application as a result.

What basis do I have to make this claim? It’s not me who says WSO2 Carbon isn’t a product. It’s none other than Paul Fremantle, CTO of WSO2, who blogged that “Carbon isn’t a product.” Q.E.D.

So, in a spirit of fun — and as a public service to BPEL developers who might have open source stars in their eyes — here’s our top 10 list of frustrations with the WSO2 Carbon BPM server that “isn’t a product:”

10. No worklist support (Why would anyone need a worklist in a business process?)
9.   No clustering (Hey, it’s open source…why not just write it yourself? Clustering ain’t so complicated.)
8.   No reporting (Wanna know things about running business processes? Write it yourself…after you’ve engineered that clustering thing.) 
7.   No fixing of in-flight processes (Got a process that’s been running for a month and failed because the SMTP server was down? Go straight to BPM Jail, do not collect $200, lose your work and start again.)
6.   Rudimentary monitoring (Need to see what’s happened with a process? Check that log file and use mental gymnastics to match it up with the process definition.)
5.   Hand-editing WSDL’s to specify where the service is hosted (Miss Notepad very much? Haven’t used “localhost” enough? Wanna hard-code the hostname in the WSDL? This piece of Carbon’s for you…)
4.   Installation (Use Eclipse to check out BPEL designer plugins, then build it in one Eclipse workspace. From that workspace, kick off another copy of Eclipse, in a different workspace, that uses those plugins. And if something goes wrong? Rinse, lather, repeat.)
3.   Deployment (Have fun specifying how the services should be deployed by editing WSDL bindings directly. Of course, if you write something that isn’t supported by the engine, it will be valid WSDL…it just won’t deploy.)
2. BPMN modeling (Have some BPMN that you want to use to get started on that critical BPM app? Translate to BPEL by hand.)

And the number one thing you cannot do with the WSO2 Carbon BPM server-that-isn’t-a-product:

1. Include people (People in a business process…feh! Who needs ‘em anyway?)

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

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

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

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

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

ActiveVOS anyone?

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

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

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

 ActiveVOS 6.0 Product Review: Download (555)

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers and Happy Holidays,
Luc

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

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

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

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

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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!