[news.eclipse.stp] Re: [stp-newsgroup] BPEL project and SOA Tools Projec

[Oisin Hurley <oisin.hurley@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Derek,

> I see what appears to be an old BPEL project (http://www.eclipse.org/bpel/).
> Does anyone know the status of this project? I see others have asked on that
> project's list and have gotten know response.

This project is still active, although it's moving forward at a slow pace.
Have you tried the bpel-dev mailing list? It has had some activity recently.

> Can someone clarify how SOA tools deals with or views BPEL? Is seems there
> is a way to generate Java from BPEL (so BPEL is being addressed in some
> form)

The BPEL Project is all about creating BPEL using a graphical editor and
also about deploying BPEL to assorted BPEL containers.

The SOA Tools Project has a BPEL-related component, called BPEL2Java,
which allows you to generate a Java program from a BPEL script.

See http://www.eclipse.org/stp/b2j/ for some details about its capabilities
and how it might be used.

I think there's great potential for both of these things to be used together.
One of the things that I always scratched my head about was that once
you get a BPEL script 'right' then there's very little you need to do with
it unless your process changes, and I always thought that processes
should change (relatively) little over time. The result is that you don't
really need a general-purpose "BPEL Engine", but you would be fine
just generating Java and running that in a JVM.

Here's where I get told how wrong I am, I presume :)

> 1) How does one generate BPEL? Is there a EMF model of BPEL we can use to
> generate it programtically?

With the BPEL Project, you draw a diagram, and it will generate the BPEL
from the diagram. It has to have an EMF domain model to work with the
diagramming technology, so yes, there is a model there. But - I'd encourage
you to look under the covers yourself because I don't know the model
details.

If you are looking to generate BPEL from some other model, you could
take a look at Intermediate Model component of STP

http://wiki.eclipse.org/STP/IM_Component

which does a number of model transformations from a canonical SOA
model...

> 2) Which BPEL engines are supported? I presume most BPEL engines should work
> but I would like to know the one that is the "default" for Eclipse projects
> if there is one.

There's no default as far as I know, but certainly in Open-Source land
many people would use Ode, an Apache 2.0-licensed BPEL engine.

 --oh