First impression Oracle BPEL Process Manager
On my previous post about Oracle BPEL process manager Dave Ruzius asks:
Hi, we’re also busy investigating BPEL Process Manager options. Did you perform some own testing / developing yet ? Whats your opinion on the tool and future of it within the Oracle product stack ?
Oracle BPEL process manager look really complete. It has a full implementation of BPEL 1.1, can handle user interaction through the TaskManager service. This allows you to create workflow like solutions.
The designer plugin for Eclipse makes it easy to create new BPEL processes (although you’ll still need to know about xml, xpath, xml schema’s, etc. So i think there’s still a big learning curve). Also deployment to different environments (test,development,etc) has been handled in an Ant build file, which is very developer friendly.
I also like the BPEL console, it gives you insight into a lot information about your BPEL processes and their instances. It provides statistics, so you can optimize the runtime of your processes. Also usefull is that all information in the BPEL console is also available through a Java API. I’m not sure though if the BPEL console is very usefull if you have thousends of processes running daily. Maybe then you’ll need to implement your own management console using these API’s. One point of dissapointment is that the BPEL console doesn’t work correctly in firefox, hopefully this will be fixed in the next version.
My guess is that the Oracle BPEL process manager will replace Oracle ProcessConnect and maybe Oracle Workflow, probably somewhere next year. It will take Oracle some time to integrate BPEL process manager into Application Server Integration and BPEL designer into JDeveloper.