Andrej Koelewijn

Lucas Jellema is reporting about the BPEL presentation at the Oracle Open World in Amsterdam today. I had also planned to attend it, but i was too busy this week: implementing a business process for a project using the Oracle BPEL process manager. Oracle’s BPEL Designer makes it look easy to create a bpel process, but you need quite some knowledge to use it: web services, xml, xml schema, using multiple namespaces in one xml document, wsdl, wsif, xpath, java, j2ee, ejb’s, ldap, jsp’s…

It’s good to hear that the bpel designer plugin for JDeveloper has already reached beta status, as running 2 IDE’s (Eclipse & JDeveloper) is a bit too much for my laptop.

During modelling the designer verifies the endpoints you define using wsdl files. It displays an error when the endpoints aren’t available. This means that it’s probably not very usefull for analysts who are designing a business process. It would be nice if you could convert UML Activity Diagrams to BPEL processes in JDeveloper. This would allow analysts to use the Activity diagrams to model the business process, which could then be converted to BPEL processes by developers.

Lucas also mentions WSIF, saying that he doesn’t exactly know what it is. His summary is pretty good though. WSIF allows you to invoke non web services as if they were web services. In BPEL when you want to use a web service you have to specify it as an endpoint by providing the wsdl file which describes the services. Oracle BPEL process manager invokes these web services through it’s web service libraries. Using apache wsif you can provide wsdl files for non web services such as EJB and Message queues. Embedded in the wsdl file are wsif tags which describe how to invoke the service. Oracle BPEL process manager will invoke these services not by using it’s web service libraries but by using the Apache wsif library.

So all the developer has to do is to write a wsdl file containing wsif tags describing the service and it can be used as an endpoint in the bpel process.

One important part currently lacking in Oracle BPEL is security. A bpel process is a web service in itself, and often you will want to restrict access to the web service. When creating web services in JDeveloper you can control access by specifying security constraints in the web.xml file. This is not possible for BPEL processes. Oracle is working on this. Integration with JAAS is expected in the next release in october, integration with Oracle single sign on is expected at the end of this year.