[alf-dev] Re: BPEL engine

["Tim Buss" <tbuss@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Antony
Thank you for your suggestions and pointers.

BPEL and Web Service are the central glue that will allow the various
disparate and distributed products found in the world of ALM to be
coordinated in ALF.  There seems to be good support for this decision.  We
chose BPEL because
 a) it is a well supported standard that seems to have some momentum
 b) there are a number of implementations available, both open source and
commercial and
 c) being XML based it should be a "friendly" designer target

We are not intending to build our own BPEL engine.  It is our intent to
remain as BPEL engine agnostic as is practical although we do intend to
deliver an example implemention of ALF that will include one of the open
source BPEL engines.

We have looked at TPTP and we see good synergy with what ALF is trying to do
across the application lifecycle and the more testing focused efforts of
TPTP.  The common BPEL aspect should allow for some solution continuity in
the future.  As to choosing TPTP as an "example" BPEL engine for ALF I think
it would be good if we had some more direct discussions with you to get a
better idea of your plans. I will contact you directly to set something up..

The BPEL designer proposal sponsored by Oracle looks promising.  It is
unclear yet how it will affect our plans since it is only at the proposal
stage.  Assuming it is the larger part of the existing Oracle BPEL designer
then most likey it will reduce the amount of work necessary to make ALF a
practical reality.  I am less familiar with JWT though at first glance I see
some overlap between this and the Oracle Designer proposal.  I suspect JWT's
generic approach will make it less practical for our needs.  Time will tell.

Tim Buss
Serena Software

"Antony Miguel" <antony.miguel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:dc516e$iq1$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx...
> I recently read the ALF project proposal and was pleasantly surprised to
> find that this new project will leverage BPEL for parts of its
> infrastructure.  I am the project level committer for the TPTP
> Choreography component which will publish a BPEL engine implementation
> in the next release of TPTP.
>
> I see that the current project plan includes selection of a BPEL engine
> for the ALF prototype.  I would like to suggest that ALF could
> potentially use the TPTP BPEL engine as its base.
>
> The documentation page for the component is at:
>
>
http://eclipse.org/tptp/platform/documents/design/choreography_html/index.html
>
>
> I would also like to ask if any thought has been given to possible
> collaboration with the BPEL-Designer project proposal and / or the Java
> Workflow Toolkit (JWT) project proposal?
>
> thanks
>
> -- 
> Antony Miguel
> Scapa Technologies
> antony.miguel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> +44 131 550 1766