[bpel-dev] Re: BPEL Designer questions followup

[James Moody <James_Moody@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Robert,

Sorry for the delay, I've been on vacation.

The items you mention are certainly
important ones. In the near term, as we focus on a 1.0 release specifically,
I'd address these items as follows:

* Complete support for BPEL 2.0 is a
must-have. The BPEL specification in OASIS looks to me like it's currently
slated to start public review on Aug. 22, finishing on Oct. 21, so provided
no major earth-shattering changes occur as part of the public review this
shouldn't have too big an impact on the project. There are a number of
OASIS items that have already been implemented in either the model, the
editor or both. That said, there is still lots of work to do on the remaining
items.

* Just a quick word about deployment
to runtime. The goals of the project in this area are: (1) to develop a
generalized framework that allows for deployment to any supported runtime,
and which allows adapters for specific runtimes to be written and plugged
in, and (2) to develop one particular adapter for a chosen reference runtime,
in order to validate the design of the framework and allow for out-of-the-box
fun. With respect to the chosen reference runtime, I think it's important
that it supports the 2.0 specification (or will support it by the time
this project reaches 1.0). However, from my point of view, I don't think
we all need to agree on a single runtime. Bruno and his folks are interested
in ActiveBPEL; the JBoss folks are obviously interested in theirs. Apache
agila has been mentioned along with others. That is to say, anyone is free
to write adapters for any runtime (open source or not) that they wish.
As for whether this adapter will be hosted by this project (i.e. stored
in our CVS repository), it would only be appropriate to do so if that runtime
is open source (and with a license that makes it legal for us to distribute
the adapter which talks to it). I think that having people writing multiple
adapters will only serve to strengthen the design of the runtime framework,
and if you are interested in contributing resources towards (1) helping
with the design of the framework, and (2) writing the adapter for Ode in
particular, that would be fantastic.

* The 1.0 release will be based on Eclipse
3.2 (or, after appropriate discussion, on any 3.2.x fix packs that arrive
before we ship).

After we deliver the 1.0 release, we'll
have to look at the Eclipse 3.3 development plan and see how that fits
in with our future plans. Do you have any immediate requirements regarding
future Eclipse versions? If so it would be good to discuss them here.

Hope this helps.

james

"Robert Brodt" <rbrodt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote on 08/03/2006 09:49:37 AM:

> Hello James,
> 
> Thanks for your response to my email on the BPEL Designer newsgroup.
> We at Sybase eagerly await the new milestone schedule so that we can
> get you specific requirements and we can determine where we might
> provide additional support.
> 
> At a high level, we would like to use the BPEL Designer in our next
> product release currently targeted to Q2'07. We are specially 
> interested in the following areas:
> 
>     * Support for BPEL 2.0
>     * Deployment to Reference implementation (we prefer
Ode)
>     * Milestones and release synchronization with Eclipse
3.3
> 
> Can you provide us any additional information regarding these areas?
> 
> Thanks in advance, and we look forward to contributing and helping
> this be a great editor.