VOSibilities

searchSOA.com has just published a story on SCA (Service Component Architecture) which describes some of the benefits that SCA delivers for developers of services-based process applications. You can read the full article here, including the comments of our CTO, Dr. Michael Rowley.

BPMN 2.0 and WS-BPEL 2.0 are the two most important standards for BPM today. But why are there two? Can’t you just care about BPEL or just care about BPMN? In fact, both standards matter and the two should be used together. To back that up, I have to convince you both that BPEL needs BPMN and that BPMN needs BPEL. In today’s post, I’ll concentrate on the first: why BPEL needs BPMN.

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.

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.

searchSOA.com’s Rob Barry has written an interesting piece on mashups and the role of BPM in creating mashups. He mentions ActiveVOS as one BPM system that because of its services-based capabilities, can quickly create mashups, or as we would call them, process applications.

This week’s topic on CTO Tuesdays was an introduction to the new WS-HumanTask standard for workflow. In this informative session, Michael Rowley describes the importance of the new standard for workflow, how it separates tasks from processing and how WS-HumanTask enables human activities to be seen as services in a process application.

Attached to this post are three files. A PDF of the slides Dr. Rowley presented, an iPod-formatted .m4v file (which requires QuickTime or iTunes to be installed) and a more-or-less standard .avi file. The .avi is the larger of the two video files.

Due to a technical error (I didn’t press “show” on GoToMeeting), the first few minutes of the video show Michael’s slides, not the ones I am discussing. Since this is just an introduction, you won’t miss anything. I’ve put those “missing” slides into the .pdf file, so you can follow along if you want to.

We had a very lively panel discussion at the end of the presentation; I hope you’ll have the time to listen to the discussion that follows the presentation.

As always, we are very interested in your feedback, comments and topic suggestions.

One more note: you can always register for the upcoming CTO Tuesdays session by visiting http://www.activevos.com/ctot. We hope you join us for next week’s webinar.

 CTO Tuesdays #2: Introduction to WS-HumanTask [49:03m]: Download (8496)
 CTO Tuesdays #2: Introduction to WS-HumanTask [48:56m]: Download (1080)
 CTO Tuesdays #2: Introduction to WS-HumanTask: Download (300)

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.

 

 BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #45: Dave Linthicum's new book on SOA and cloud computing [45:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2459)
 BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #45: Dave Linthicum's new book on SOA and cloud computing: Download (166)

At Gartner’s BPM Summit in October, ebizQ’s Peter Schooff talked with me (Alex Neihaus) and Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley about ActiveVOS 7.0 and its new BPMN 2.0 modeler. A link to the podcast is below and it is included in our podcast feed in the iTunes Store.

 

 eBizQ podcast:How BPMS Delivers Value to Today's Business [4:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (133)

We are very pleased to post the recording of the first episode of our new weekly webinar on BPM technology called CTO Tuesdays.

Every Tuesday, Active Endpoints’ CTO Michael Rowley, will present a topic of interest to BPM users. Our inaugural topic was an explanation of the meaning and uses of the BPMN 2.0 diamond symbol. If you are interested in learning BPMN 2.0 — or if you just want to brush up on some of the more advanced considerations in using this basic BPMN symbol — you will find this recording very instructive. Concepts are demonstrated in ActiveVOS 7’s new BPMN 2.0 modeler.

Attached to this post are two versions of the webinar: an iPod-formatted .m4v file our podcast subscribers will automatically receive and an H.264-encoded .avi file (which is much larger at about 113MB).

We welcome your input and suggestions for CTO Tuesdays. Contact us via email at editor at activevos dot com. Today, the best way to be notified of upcoming CTO Tuesdays is to be on our mailing list. And, the best way to get onto our mailing list is to download a trial of ActiveVOS. You can also register for upcoming CTO Tuesdays by clicking on the link in the right hand column of any interior page on www.activevos.com.

We are working hard on making registering for CTO Tuesdays easier. But because of the demand for education on topics like BPMN 2.0, we started the webinar series without waiting to dot all the “i’s” and cross all our “t’s.”

Update: You can now register for CTO Tuesdays by clicking the link in the right-hand column of any page on www.activevos.com except the home page. So, just navigate into the site a little and you’ll get a little reward: easy access to registration for CTO Tuesdays.

Updated update: You can now always register for the upcoming CTO Tuesdays at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

We hope you enjoy this recording and that you will join us as your schedule permits for the live CTO Tuesdays every Tuesday at noon ET, 9am PT, 16:00 GMT (17:00 GMT after the end of US daylight savings time in November, 2009).

 

 CTOT #1: The BPMN diamond [39:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (4597)
 CTOT #1: The BPMN diamond [39:30m]: Download (7400)

Last week, CTO Michael Rowley and I showed ActiveVOS 7 to Rob Barry of TechTarget’s SOA Talk blog.  I know it’s a party foul to quote yourself in a blog post, but we are grateful that Rob chose to highlight one of the main accomplishments we believe we have achieved for BPM in ActiveVOS 7:

“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.

As has become something of a tradition here at Active Endpoints, I recently sat down with CTO Michael Rowley and Sr. Director of Products Luc Clément to talk about ActiveVOS 7.0 from the perspective of two of the people who have been heavily involved in the design and development of this major release.

ActiveVOS 7.0 is a major release of the BPMS and contains many new innovative capabilities. In fact, our discussion of the new BPMN 2.0 design canvas and our new AJAX forms design capability which allows humans to become services in an orchestration was so interesting that we decided to cover other new features in an additional podcast so as to not run too long in this one.

Michael, Luc and I will record a part 2 covering those features soon. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this introduction to ActiveVOS 7.0 BPMN 2.0 design with BPEL execution and the discussion of how WS-HumanTask was implemented in an AJAX forms designer.

Update: As promised, we have posted part 2 of this discussion here.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #37: ActiveVOS 7.0, part 1 [27:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1524)

One of the hottest topics in enterprise computing today is the proper relationship between business users and IT. Our CEO, Mark Taber, blogged about one aspect of this important topic just yesterday. Also yesterday, Gartner’s Jim Sinur wrote a very compelling post asking additional questions about the proper relationship between IT and end users.

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.

 Aligning For a More Successful Business and IT Development Paradigm: Download (616)

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.

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!

I’ve been itching to write and simultaneously dreading writing this post for the last 48 hours. That’s because I know that whatever I say about Oracle 11g, and in particular, Oracle SOA Suite, will be perceived by our readers — with some justification — as hopelessly biased. After all, ActiveVOS is the primary competitor to SOA Suite, and it’s my job to make that clear to anyone interested in BPM. Many will expect only self-serving commentary. Still, there will be lots of talk about 11g and we certainly have an interest in its impact on the marketplace.

What may not be so obvious is that despite the perceived bias, I really do want to try to get beyond our obvious self-interest to communicate something even more important, which is less about ActiveVOS than about the difference between what a vendor with a new mega-release says and what it would mean to actually use the system.

In a nutshell, Oracle didn’t pull it off.

Let me explain.

I attended an 11g and SOA Suite launch seminar this week. Oracle drew a good audience from among its current customers. And, in a positive leading indicator, a majority of the customers were interested in SOA Suite, primarily for business process management.

Between the keynote and the SOA Suite breakout, I counted over 150 PowerPoint slides. Endlessly repeated claims of being “unified,” and “#1 in the market,” and “placed in the ‘leaders’ quadrant’” by every analyst on the planet. Screenshots and Shockwave (Shockwave??!!) demos of bits and pieces of products. (The Shockwave demos failed, if you can believe it. The demon of all software companies that trashes demos lives on…)

Their message? In 11g and in SOA Suite, Oracle has achieved the incomprehensible: a unification of dozens of acquisitions into a single coherent, “unified, hot-pluggable, standards-based” whole that can be easily implemented and used.

What’s amazing about this — and what I know you’d have seen too if you were in the room — isn’t that people doubt this claim…it’s that they are so overwhelmed by the opposite reality as demonstrated by Oracle’s presentation that they just didn’t know what to think. The audience was so inundated by bits and pieces of this or that product that were obviously silos that they were, literally, dumbstruck. They were speechless…and not from epiphany.

I  was astonished that at the end of the SOA Suite breakout, there wasn’t a single question asked by customers. Partly embarrassed for Oracle by the silence, I asked a question and an industry analyst asked a question. That was it. After 70 slides — with no live product demo — and 90 minutes of saying all the right things, not a word. No discussion. No buzz. People just didn’t know what to think.

If after millions of hours of development, billions of dollars in acquisitions and a deluge of PowerPoint slides hewing to fashion — “We’ve got CEP! We’ve got BPMN 2.0! We’ll migrate you to 11g automatically! We’ll run BPEL and BPMN 2.0 natively, side-by-side and models can share metadata! JDeveloper is the tool to use! We support development in Eclipse! We have SCA!” — you just can’t figure out how your organization could be successful quickly and easily with all this, there’s a problem. If after all this, you haven’t got a question you could ask in public — if there wasn’t one thing you wanted to clarify for yourself —  there’s a big, big problem.

And that problem is the customers in the room just couldn’t picture themselves being successful with SOA Suite. Despite all the talk about “unified” it was embarrassingly clear that 11g is a “product” only its legions of product managers and engineers could love.

It’s like the runway model pictured above. He’s wearing the right color (black, of course). And he looks like a model with that pouty expression. But that hairdo! It just doesn’t work. Apparently, the designer looked around the fashion world, bought up everything he could, spent a long time laboring over the costume, then trotted it out on the catwalk to shocked silence as everyone in the room realized that the pieces — the pants, the shirt, the hairdo — just don’t work together.

Update October 20, 2009: See what we’ve done to make people aware of the size and bloat of Oracle SOA Suite here, here and here.

We are pleased to offer a recording of a webinar presented by Jim Ballas, Ph.D. and Justin Nevitt of the Naval Research Laboratory on the topic of process orchestration for defense systems. Originally presented on July 29, 2009, the webinar also features Rick Rosenburg, CEO, Seros, Inc and me, Alex Neihaus, as moderator and host. Jim and Justin describe the leading-edge work they have done in researching the applicability of web services and orchestration for defense systems. Their learnings are also generally applicable to non-defense users interested in developing the next generation of applications.

There are three files attached to this post. First, an iPod-formatted .m4v file that’s approximately 140MB in size. Subscribers to the VOSibilities podcast feed (search on “vosibilities” in the iTunes Store) will automatically receive this file. Also available are a DivX-encoded .avi file (about 375MB) and the slides that were presented as a PDF.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #36: The Naval Research Laboratory on SOA-based process orchestration [83:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (809)
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