Andrej Koelewijn

Yesterday i attended the Amis query on Oracle BPEL, to see how Oracle’s BPEL plugin for JDeveloper is progressing. Both the Eclipse version and the new JDeveloper version were demoed, and we had a chance to try them. I must say Oracle’s making good progress on the plugin and according to Oracle’s Sandor Nieuwenhuijs a production release should be available in a couple of months. A beta release will be available soon.

Some points discussed yesterday:

• Oracle is going to include a Web services gateway in Oracle Application server 10.1.3. The gateway will allow you to add security in the application server to already existing services, so you won’t need to modify all the existing services.

• Oracle is is not yet going to provide a tool to convert high level business process diagrams to BPEL. The question is what should such a tool do and do you really want it: do you really want to automatically translate process diagrams generated by non technical people into an executable process? My opinion is that it’s not very important. I think it would be more usefull if there was a tool to convert complex BPEL diagrams into easy to read high level process diagrams (e.g., UML activity diagrams) so that you have a tool for explaining to business what your BPEL processes are doing.

• Sandor discussed the various Oracle process management/workflow/integration tools and their future. Oracle Workflow is here to stay as it’s heavily used in Oracle Applications, but if you don’t use Oracle Applications then you’re probably better of using a standards compliant tool, ie., Oracle BPEL.

• If you want a book on BPEL: Sandor recommended Business Process Execution Language for Web Services

• The BPEL plugin now has a service adapters plugin wizard. This wizard will create all the configuration files you need to use existing services through WSIF. Using this wizard you can using Oracle AQ (advanced queueing), ftp services, and detect and read files. This last option was pretty nice: it allows you to specify the structure of text files (fixed column, comma separated, etc), and the text files will be converted to Xml by the BPEL process manager. One important option missing in this wizard was the option to generated configuration files for EJB services. But this option is comming according to Sandor.

• The BPEL plugin now also contains a xml transformations tool, which enables you to graphically specify how xml files should be transformed to other xml formats. In other words, it’s a visual xslt editor.