BPEL 2.0, the long-awaited love-child of the OASIS WS-BPEL TC, is at last in its final public comment phase. See John Evdemon's blog for all the links. Sure, conventional wisdom says two years is a long time to change Switch to If-then, but if Assaf's comments are correct, fixing BPEL 1.1's primitive data manipulation syntax may prove to be a far more significant change. Once the thing is finally approved we can anticipate a ripple effect on BPMSes, and a round of new questions.
eClarus today declared they've cracked a tough nut in the BPMN-BPEL roundtripping problem.
If you follow that topic, you probably know that Yi Gao of Seattle startup eClarus and Marlon Dumas of Queensland University of Technology are basically the two guys in the world who know what they're talking about. Way back in February, when I was still blogging on Ismael's site, I posted on the roundtripping problem. You can find that thread here on BPMS Watch or here at IT|Redux.
In the comment thread, Marlon responded to my post by describing some of his group's academic work on the question.
We have recently defined a BPMN-to-BPEL translation that can deal with BPMN graphs with arbitrary topology. In this translation, if the original graph is well-structured, the resulting BPEL code follows the structure of the original graph and everything works well. But if the BPMN graph is not structured, the translation generates rather convoluted BPEL code and the way back to BPMN would be far from easy. For those interested, see this technical report....
There are classes of models for which a reversible BPMN-to-BPEL-and-back translation is possible. We can define three such classes of models:
This morning I trekked over the hill to Redwood Shores to find out what Oracle is up to in BPM. I came away impressed.
Even though I made a point of not identifying the author in print, the creator of Figure 3 in my original What's Wrong With This Picture post takes me to task for not contacting him discreetly with my correction. Welcome to the blogosphere, my man. Anyway, he posts his own correction, basically repeating my explanation.
But if the guy were really engaged, he would have noticed that images 4, 5, and 6 are also his bogus examples. So to accelerate this thing, let's just post the answers here so we can move on to more interesting stuff.
Last week I posted several examples of illegal and nonsensical BPMN that you can find online in popular free tutorials and BPMN tools. If you believe that the notation is too hard for business analysts to use, you might consider instead that widely propagated disinformation such as this is mostly to blame. Of course you can teach people to use BPMN effectively, including the part where it represents the biggest advance in process modeling, handling of business exceoptions.
I've discovered (the hard way) something that experienced bloggers learned long ago. Blogs attract "real" (i.e. paying) work, and when the blog starts to take off, you suddenly don't have time to do it any more. But you just have to make time. So I will, and I'm back.
Re yesterday's post, Yi Gao of eClarus wanted to get this image in his response, so I'm posting the following note on his behalf.
From Yi Gao, Oct 13, 2006:
In eClarus Business Process Modeler 1.0 that was released in June, we could translate the BPMN models with synchronization links. We had some samples that show the capability even though we did not explicitly categorize the models in our website.
The simply structured BPMN models defined as Class 3 can be translated to ?readable BPEL? using context-free pattern matching. The technique is similar to computer language parsing based on a finite number of production rules. However, with synchronization link, the context-free pattern matching is not sufficient.
Let me use the following diagram to explain.
Yeesterday IBM briefed analysts on their latest round of BPM and related "business services" announcements, all part of their broad push on SOA. They start with a message we can all nod our heads about: Services are the building blocks for business processes. But connecting the dots is not that simple.
Recently a BPMS Watch reader wrote with some questions about modeling ITIL processes in BPMN. ITIL is an industry standard framework for managing IT services. It describes a number of interrelated business processes, including Change Management and Release Management. These processes are linked, but not in a one-to-one correspondence - one release does not correspond to one change - and it thus provides an interesting real-world example of the 1:N problem in BPMN, which I also call the batching/debatching problem.
Intalio, which calls itself the Open Source BPMS Company, yesterday announced the donation of a BPMN modeling tool to the open source community, and tomorrow plans to add a "BPEL4People-based" workflow framework. The BPMN modeler, donated to the Eclipse Foundation, is now available under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) and is part of the SOA Tools Platform (STP) project. This follows Intalio's donation of its EMF model comparator to the Eclipse Foundation earlier this year, and complements the PXE BPEL Engine it previously donated to the Apache Software Foundation. Tomorrow, Intalio plans to announce the availability of its Tempo workflow framework under the open-source Apache Software License. The project is hosted by SourceForge. Intalio describes Tempo as an implementation of the BPEL4People proposal from IBM and SAP last year,
