According to the ALF 2005 Eclipse
Word presentation, “Apache Agila (aka Twister) is the current primary choice for
the orchestration engine”.
I installed and tried both Agila and
ActiveBPEL. I would not want to use Agila in the POC. I can’t
justify Agila as being a primary choice for the POC. My comparison of the
two is given below.
Can anyone give a few good reasons
for using Agila over ActiveBPEL?
I tried both the Apache Agila BPEL
engine as well as that of ActiveBPEL. I found ActiveBPEL to be much easier
to install and target for deploy, with a far larger community.
Installation
Requirements:
=======================
Agila
* Servlet containter (e.g., Tomcat
5)
* Relational Database (e.g, MySQL,
Oracle; HSQL-DB provided)
* XML Database (Apache XIndice
provided)
* Subversion
Client
* Apache
Maven
* XDoclet 1.2.x (has plugin required
for Maven)
* Apache
Ant
ActiveBpel
* Servlet containter (e.g., Tomcat
5)
Deploy
Procedure
========================
Agila
* Done through web interface (not
fully tested to verify). During the course of my testing with Agilia’s
error-riddled samples, I managed to corrupt the Agila engine’s relational
database and could not verify its web deploy page.
ActiveBPEL
* Done by copying ActiveBPEL custmom
jar. Requires tedious creation of ActiveBPEL “process deployment
description” file.
A forum user has contributed java
code to automatically generate this pdd file given the BPEL and WSDL inputs.
(not tested to verify)
Community
==========
Agila
Sparsely contributed to gzipped mail
archive (e.g., 2 posts for all of September 2005).
ActiveBPEL
Five forums actively monitored by
admins who provide explanations, fix suggestions. Over 2,500 posts from
about 400 registered users.
Docs/Samples
============
Agila
A wiki site w/three web page guides
for Install, Users, Development. Three error-riddled samples, missing
message definitions, etc.
ActiveBPEL
Several guides for installation,
usage, deployment, architecture. Six complete samples including client
source code and ant build, deploy, and test scripts. Five of the samples
verified to work with one not building (custom_xpath_function) due to using old
ActiveBPEL version API.
Odds &
Ends
============
I’m not sure how they compare
against administrative/event APIs available through web services or
event/exception handling. I do know ActiveBPEL supports the former and is
fully implements BPEL4WS1.1.