Java Reference
In-Depth Information
BPEL Engine and Designer Implementations
The BPEL engine is a new component in your SOA, and there are a variety of commercial
and open source products available.
Open source and free implementations include Apache ODE and Sun's BPEL Service Engine,
available within OpenESB. The Active BPEL engine, provided by Active Endpoints, is avail-
able either as a free community edition or as a commercial product with support. Other com-
mercial products include Microsoft's BizTalk server and Oracle BPEL Process Manager. Be-
cause BPEL is a standard, you can generally port a BPEL across any of these platforms (as-
suming that you don't go off the deep end using vendor-specific extensions).
The second aspect of working with BPEL is the process designer. Because BPEL is just XML,
you could write BPEL using a plain-text editor. The same is true for Java or C#, of course,
although in practice, we often prefer to use tools to aid us, especially important when we're
first learning. In the same way, a good BPEL designer can clarify and validate your work and
present a visual representation akin to UML modeling tools.
Some of the companies that offer execution engines also offer visual process designers. For
example, Active Endpoints' ActiveBPEL Designer has tight integration with their engine.
Processes for deployment to Sun's BPEL Service Engine for OpenESB can be created using
NetBeans 6.X. There is an Eclipse plug-in project that turns Eclipse into a BPEL editor.
(However, the plug-in is in milestone release and doesn't seem to have been updated in a
while, so the status of that project isn't clear.) Many of the big-ticket stack vendors (IBM, Sun,
etc.) offer designer solutions specific to their runtime engines as well. Overall, you have a lot
of options here.
