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, 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)

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)

You have to admit that the economic news these days has become truly frightening. In the US, joblessness has reached levels not seen in decades. Across the planet, governments are being forced to intervene in their economies in unprecedented ways.

But this isn’t a blog about economics. Instead, it’s a blog about a technology — business process management (BPM) — that allows enterprises to respond to these challenging times.

Jim Sinur of Gartner wrote this week about how customers’ perceptions of what BPM can accomplish for them today have changed from what they were just before the current economic upheaval. And to nobody’s surprise, the economic climate has pushed aside technical benefits in favor of bottom-line considerations like reducing costs and improving quality.

We have just one suggestion to add to the mix: think about saving big bucks in the BPM system itself.  Consider the costs of having to integrate multiple “stack” products to achieve a BPM application — having to build the car from a kit before you can drive it. Consider the costs of BPMN-only systems which cannot directly execute the application without being either proprietary or adding megabytes of hand-coded Java. Consider, finally, the costs of delay because your company simply cannot afford millions for a BPM system.

We like to think that ActiveVOS is the ideal product for these times: open, comprehensive, all-in-one, easy-to-learn and -deploy. But most of all, affordable. Maybe the silver lining in all this economic turmoil is that customers’ costly-is-better price prejudice with respect to BPM will dissolve on the alter of necessity and allow them to discover BPM that’s both better and less costly. That’s ActiveVOS. And it’s one reason we’ve recently displaced IBM at a giant European insurer and why we continue to gain market traction. Do yourself a favor: see if your BPM vendor posts its prices. We do, right here. We want you to know going in what a great system costs.

When your company is looking to BPM applications to save more pennies, it only makes sense that you would want to squeeze costs out of the BPM system itself. And it’s pretty clear that what Jim’s clients were thinking, too.

‘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!

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

Bruce writes:

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

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

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

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

Think about this process model:

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

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

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

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

Rich Seeley has written a very interesting article about how visual modeling of business processes enables IT to work more closely with business users. Rich also points out how ActiveVOS has achieved great results for Fastenal.

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

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

 Active Endpoints ships ActiveVOS 6.0.2: Download (315)

In this fascinating podcast, Michael Rowley, director of strategy and technology at Active Endpoints discusses the history of how the Business Process Modeling Language (BPMN) and the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) were unfortunately “separated” at birth. He also describes why BPMN and BPEL belong together and what the current efforts in the standards organizations working on BPMN and BPEL are doing to re-unite these two critical standards for SOA-based development.

The good news is that SOA developers are the ultimate winners of the inevitable reconciliation of BPMN and BPEL, but as Rowley describes, the reconciliation isn’t intended — and indeed shouldn’t be — a perfect union.

Rowley concludes by describing what ActiveVOS 6.0 delivers today for SOA developers who want to work with BPMN and BPEL in a single, integrated, deployable product.

We hope you enjoy this podcast, and, as always, welcome your comments on this podcast.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #19: Why BPMN and BPEL were (unfortunately) separated at birth and what it means for SOA developers [19:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (419)

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to review a new book on creating SOA-based applications. I was surprised to be invited to review a technical book because I am pretty lightweight technically. But I was also pleased that this blog has attracted enough readership so that the publisher thought a mention here could help get the word out about this new book.

Despite my trepidation that reading the book would tax my understanding of the technology (after all, I am a marketing guy, not a developer), I found reading Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL  (Matjaz Juric and Kapil Pant, 305 pages, Packt Publishing, August 2008, $59.99) surprisingly easy.

Still, to be very honest much of the technical discussion was lost on me. To my novice eye, the book is well organized and well presented. The initial chapter presents an excellent argument for developing SOA applications; later chapters move progressively from conceptual modeling to BPMN and then into the deployment of processes using BPEL.

My only regret is that the authors were forced to (I hope they didn’t want to) use the Oracle stack of products to illustrate many of the actual implementation considerations, especially when describing BPEL. Naturally, it hurts me to read all about a competitor’s product, especially when we believe ActiveVOS 6.0’s BPMN-to-BPEL integration is far easier to use and implement. Had the authors used the ActiveVOS visual orchestration system, they could have eliminated pages of Oracle product names descriptions and “when to use what” recommendations.  Maybe the authors will consider changing for the next edition of the book.

But as I read the book, it occurred to me that my surface understanding of the technology actually made it easier for me to see the “theology” inherent in the BPMN and BPEL debate we so often hear about. Consider this passage:

The fundamental difference between BPMN and BPEL is also the reason why some tools have started providing extensible features…to allow a round-trip feedback loop between the business process users working in BPMN and technical teams developing in BPEL…This is a topic of debate, as we are asking our business community to think like a programmer and model business processes to create consistent technical output in the form of BPEL, which is unfair.

Here, the authors have the exposed the fundamental issue for creating SOA-based BPM applications: should the top-down, business-analyst creates-a-model-for-everything, BPMN view of work reign supreme? Or should the structured, execution-oriented BPEL approach to automation be ascendant?

My answer? It depends. If you are in a company in which the objective is 100% transparency of processes, in which people are told what to do and how to do it, in which creativity flows from the BPMN diagram, your approach is clear…and doubleplusgood. (And, yes, I have an opinion.)

OTOH, if you believe that computers are tools for people, that it’s better to let machines do the repetitive parts of a process while easily including less-structured human tasks, you have the choice of a different approach using BPEL and BPMN. And I think the choice has a lot to do with your company’s cultural ethos.

Still, what’s nice about these standards is even though they’ve been put together in a shotgun wedding and the marriage is far from comfortable, the union of these two technologies gives users ultimate flexibility to implement SOA applications as they prefer. And as a book to illustrate how to implement these choices, you can’t go wrong with Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL (as long as you don’t use Oracle stuff to do it).

In this podcast, I talk with Luc Clement, our Sr. Director of Product Management for the “inside story” on the development of ActiveVOS 6.0 and the features we think make it so important and unique. You’ll hear Luc and me discuss our thinking behind the new features and improvements we made in our visual orchestration system. We hope you enjoy this podcast.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #16: Luc Clement on ActiveVOS 6.0 [21:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (238)

Today, Active Endpoints announced ActiveVOS 6.0, the world’s most complete and open visual orchestration system. You can read all the details about ActiveVOS 6.0 in the PDF attached to this post. We also encourage you to try ActiveVOS 6.0 with our free, supported 30-day trial at www.activevos.com/trial.

 Active Endpoints Announces ActiveVOS 6.0: Download (444)

In this audio podocast, Guerman Smirnov, systems development manager at Australian telecom AAPT, describes how his company has used ActiveVOS to extend complex internal DSL service assurance capabilities to AAPT’s resellers and partners. In doing so, AAPT has reaped the benefits of moving to the 100% standards-based BPEL capabilities included in ActiveVOS and has reduced the internal resources necessary to provide good customer service.

As always, thank you for listening and we look forward to your feedback.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #15 for SOA, BPEL, BPMN, BPMS and CEP users: AAPT Orchestrates Service Assurance with ActiveVOS [12:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (291)