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.
July 23rd, 2004 at 9:38 pm
Hey Andrej,
.
The last two days I’ve ‘probed’ the PM (0.8). I was impressed about Eclipse 3.0 (tip: Use the RC3 for PM instead of the production release). Installing the PM was very smooth, but trying the testdrive tutorials wasn’t very successful
The designer looks very good and is easy to use. I’m curious about the scaling capabilities of the engine. I also tried the version by version but did not get it to work.
I’m looking forward to the next version (0.9) at the at of this month according Edwin.
July 25th, 2004 at 6:09 pm
Jeroen,
May I ask what problem you ran into while trying to get the engine started? I want to make sure that it is on our radar and addressed for the RC9/0.9 release which is scheduled later this week (most likely Friday the 30th).
Thank you,
Edwin
July 26th, 2004 at 1:20 pm
Hi Edwin,
I got the engine started successfully, but trying the testdrive tutorial “LoanDemoPlus” I ran into a problem due to an inconsistency between the bpel definition and the corresponding wsdl (no big deal).
I also made progress with the version-by-version feature. I noticed that the version is a bpelc attribute, however once I deployed a 2.0 version, running a previous version wasn’t possible anymore although I selected the previous version explicitly using the console
August 5th, 2004 at 8:43 am
There was indeed a bug in the life cycle manager. That bug has been fixed in the RC9 release that will hit OTN tomorrow morning. -Edwin
August 31st, 2005 at 10:19 am
Hi,
I am an Egyptian software develper ,
I use Oracle Forms Reports Pl/Sql server side programs,
I want to go to Java based technology especially jdeveloper,
Can any one help or recommend me the way to start,
my e-mail is omar_foda@yahoo.com
June 26th, 2007 at 2:14 am
check out IBM Process Server ,it implements SCA/SDO apart from BPEL spec ,far more advanced than Oracle BPEL product