Posts Tagged ‘BPEL’


Oracle BPM 11g Preview at Oracle Open World 2009

October 13th, 2009 by Mark Peterson • 4 Comments »

I think the wait was worth it. After BEA’s AquaLogic BPM (formerly Fuego) was purchased by Oracle, the product became part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware suite. But instead of being in the lime-light of Fusion, for the past year it was hardly mentioned. The Marketing story focused on SOA, Tuxedo, WebCenter and WebLogic. For BPM pure-plays, BPM has its own story, a good story; one with business centered not IT centered values.

Well there it is! It re-appeared in a General Session at Oracle Open World 2009 with all the other Fusion Middleware products. The product development team must have been busy. They took Aqualogic BPM apart and re-assemble it with more features and benefits for the business than ever before. Eduardo Chiocconi and Mariano Benitez demonstrated the new version of BPM at the Moscone West Exhibit hall. The product has been integrated with JDeveloper and Enterprise Manager. It is part of the Fusion middleware product suite and seems to have more capability than before.

For businesses, the need for a rich user-experience has been achieved. The BPM studio is integrated with the ADF development environment; a JSF-based technology. You can develop UIs from studio or import ADF projects and use them in interactive BPM activities. This segmentation of the business process from the UI should also allow the UI to take advantage of externally developed UIs; something that was lacking before in BPM. This segmentation may make it easier to integrate legacy UI applications, perhaps even UIs not based in ADF.

BPM 11g has also improved on the type of roles available for activities. You can now specify interactive tiers for approval or review activities. For instance, if the CFO needs to approve purchases over $100,000, then the work-item can be escalated without coding specialized escalation processes to route the purchase orders based on these rules. These rules of who and when people need to review or approve work can change. BPM now handles this without the need for re-writing and re-deploying the new processes. An administrator can simple re-configure the user-roles.

BPM 11g has many other features as well. It has a state-of-the-art rules engine. It can handle most business rules and conditional requirements without the need to integrate third-party rules engines. It has a new milestone activity switch to enhance business activity monitoring and instance processing by the workspace. It also has integrated Oracle BAM to enhance the ability to obtain information about the business process.

BPM 11g adds these features on top of the 10g BPM feature set, so the return for implementing BPM is improved. I was only able to get a glimpse of the new Oracle BPM 11g, but from this glimpse I am excited about the possibilities. Oracle 11g will not be available for download until Feb 2010. I am looking forward to getting my hands on the new version and feel at this time, the wait will be worth it.

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Oracle spotlights BPM in Fusion Middleware Story

October 12th, 2009 by Mark Peterson • No Comments »

After hearing the Fusion Middleware story many times now, I am so relieved and happy to see Business Process Management (BPM) in the spot light once again.  During the Oracle Open World 2009 General Session “Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Foundation for Innovation” we heard about SOA, the Enterprise 2.0 Portal and Tuxedo; but what is that? We were given a demo of the new Oracle BPM 11g application development environment. We got to see swim-lanes, process models, simulations and dash-boards. They showed how you can obtain process model metrics and key performance indicators for your process.  They made significant improvements over the way BPM integrates with applications and systems.

I feel this completes the Oracle’s Fusion Middleware Story. BPM spans the entire Fusion product suite and needs to be in the spot-light. No other application takes a holistic view of the enterprise and provides a coherent platform to integrate business application the way the business needs them.  We’ve heard many times that it’s not about IT anymore. That is certainly true. It should be about Business Processes and BPM solutions needs be part of the strategy.

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Gauging the Impact of BEA on the Oracle E-Business Suite

July 1st, 2008 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

Today, Oracle provided a view into their plans for the integration of the BEA Aqualogic products into the Oracle product line. Oracle is very experienced at this effort and it showed in the presentation. They focused a lot on reassuring BEA and Oracle customers that there would be no drastic changes and no forced upgrades.

For E-Business Suite users, they mentioned specifically that there will be no forced migrations from the Oracle Application Server. This will only impact those who have upgraded to the 10g version of the Application Server, which would be customers on Release 12 or those who have added new Fusion Middleware components such as Identity Management to their existing Release 11i environments.

Here are the key points that I took away from the presentations which focused, as expected, on Fusion Middleware.

Oracle is extending support of several products for both companies to reduce the upgrade requirements. The integrations of BEA/Oracle products are expected to occur over 12 to 18 months. Oracle will provide a single integrated development toolset that incorporates both BEA/Oracle products. JDeveloper, ADF, and Oracle Forms/Reports will remain. A new Eclipse Pack will be released to help BEA development users migrate.

Oracle Data Integrator, TopLink, Coherence, AIA, Web Services Manager, Service Registry, BPA Designer, BAM, WebCenter, and Business Rules will remain. The Oracle Applications Server will eventually be replaced by BEA’s offering (JRockit, Weblogic) but the OAS will be maintained for some time. Inside the Fusion Middleware, the Oracle Enterprise Service Bus will be merged with BEA’s offering.

BEA’s Aqualogic BPM Designer will be kept and used as an agile process modeling counterpart to the Oracle BPA Designer. Both will be updated to share a common metadata model so that model information can be shared between them.

Oracle will revise their BPEL processing engine and introduce BEA’s Enterprise Repository (SOA governance). Pricing for the BEA products has been simplified and country-specific pricing has been replaced with a worldwide pricing model.

Several BEA products will be included in new Oracle Enterprise Manager Packs. In particular, a new Diagnostics Pack for Java Virtual Machine tuning based on JRockit Mission Control has been added.

Several topics were not discussed, but I want to note them. What about BEA Tuxedo? How will these changes impact the middleware stack for the Fusion Applications?

To summarize, Oracle is not making radical changes that will impact current E-Business Suite users or BEA users. Instead they will be cherry-picking the BEA product line to introduce some new products and bulk up existing products with better technologies from BEA. Existing products will continue to be supported, some up to 9 more years.

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AIA Origins – Service Oriented Architecture

February 29th, 2008 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

With the introduction of Services, XML, Java and the introduction of WSDL, WSIF there came other new supporting software products. Java had always depending on the Java Virtual Machine because it is essentially an interpreted language (but it can be compiled to machine language..).

The new supporting software products included the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), the Business Processing Execution Language (BPEL) and the Business Process Engine.

BPEL was an XML language for grouping the execution of individual Services together. BPEL is sort of like a batch language. It provides If-Then-Else capabilities and can start a Service, send it a message, and handle the result. BPEL needs a Business Process Engine (written in Java) to execute. The nice thing about BPEL is that it is a configuration language that doesn’t require complex programming. It relies on the Services to do the low-level work. If a Services is an employee, then a BPEL document is the Manager telling who to do what and when.

The ESB was a solution for the problem of automating connections between different environments and doing any necessary translation. Many systems have different formats for their information and it made sense to create something in-between to translate the format and pass it automatically on to the destination. ESB is a Java program that does this using XML instructions. It is called a Service Bus because like a Data Bus in that it manages the transmission of information between two parties.

ESB, BPEL and the Business Process Manager/Engine along with several other components are typically bundled into a SOA Suite. The other components could be a Service Repository which is a directory of the registered Services or a Web Services Manager (WSM) which enforces certain security restrictions. What security you ask? Well suppose you have a Service that returns compensation from the Payroll system. You would want to restrict who could call that Service, right? The WSM allows restrictions to be defined so that doesn’t happen.

So now we have a Service Oriented Architecture Suite. That seems nice and tidy. Why would we need anything more? And that’s where AIA Foundation Pack comes in…

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AIA Origins – The XML and Java Factor

February 29th, 2008 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

AIA and SOA are all based on industry standards that have developed over the last 10-15 years. Several of the key standards were Java and XML.

With the advent of the World Wide Web there was a whole new emphasis on sharing information through the Internet. Everywhere developers were trying to come up with common ways to do this using Java.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was an eventual outcome of the idea of building re-usable building blocks of programming code (usually in Java).

These shared blocks of code in the Web World became known as Services and were usually executing on a Web Server. They were originally considered “Web” services but over time that changed to include other languages and non-web environments.

At the same time HTML (HyperText Markup Language) was becoming popular because of the World Wide Web and developers saw the potential to use a variant, called XML (Extended Markup Language) for sharing information between Services.

XML is an easy way to describe sets of information in a language friendly method. XML is nice because you can define anything you want and transmit it as a set of characters. A good piece of XML includes both the data and descriptions of what the data is. That’s different from traditional transactions which only include the data. Here’s an XML example.


As you can see this is a “note” to Lou Ann from Robert. Each data field is delimited by a bracketed field name. If it were an true email it would have definitely many more data elements like email addresses, dates, etc.. But as you can see the XML does a good job of describing what is being sent and then providing the actual data. It’s human readable which is also a nice feature.

Once XML became popular other things were built on top of it using the same concept. One was WSDL(”wisdull”). Web Services Definition Language is an XML document that describes what a Service is and what it does and what it requires. Think of it as a resume’ for a Service.

If you want to talk to a Service you ask for it’s WSDL and then you know all of the important details about it. But what if the Service is not Java or some modern language? What if it was Cobol? No problem.

If you have a Cobol program that accepts input, does some function and provides a result you can make it look like a Service as well. That would require WSIF or Web Services Invocation Framework. This is a Java Applications Programming Interface (API) that allows non-Java formats to work with other Services.

Soon other XML-based solutions came along like SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) which is a way to send messages between Services using XML.

The combination of Java and XML was a real change agent for sharing information both inside organizations using their IntrAnet and with partners using the Internet.

Now, let’s see if we can get back closer to the topic of AIA by understanding more about SOA.

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