The BPEL Game Show…with contestant David Linthicum
June 16th, 2008 by Alex
Last week, David Linthicum’s SOA podcast continued a theme he’s been on lately, a discussion of BPEL’s “fallings” [sic]. I think he meant failings…but in any event, he mentions several times in the podcast that a post he’d previously written on this topic had generated quite a discussion (it did) and feedback from unnamed “BPEL vendors” (that’d be us; I can’t imagine why he didn’t name us. (-: )
Anyway, today after I heard the podcast, I asked Chris Keller, our founder and vp of development and one of the most knowledgeable people on BPEL in the world for his feedback. Chris has not only written the BPEL engine that’s at the core of our visual orchestration system (a VOS is a whole lot more than a BPEL engine), he’s active on the OASIS committees that are furthering the standards.
Chris gave me a lot of food for thought, and being in a playful mood, I thought it might be fun to that feedback into a Q&A. Sorta like a game show, with Mr. Linthicum as the contestant. The prize, for correct answers, is a free ActiveVOS license. Let’s see how Mr. Linthicum does…
Question 1: In the podcast, David says that a major problem with BPEL is that it’s synchronous.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out… Then click here to read the correct answer
Question 2: David says BPEL has a few programmer-level issues including limitations around request/reply exchanges in a heterogeneous architecture.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out…Then click here to read the correct answer
Question 3: David says BPEL has issues with failure recovery, exception handling and multi-programming model support.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out…Then click here to read the correct answer
Question 4: David says BPEL is not very good at adding a human as part of the process and as SOA moves forward, he’s finding that composites and workflows are more applicable than simple service binding and extending.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out…Then click here to read the correct answer
We hope that you’ve enjoyed our little episode of The BPEL Game Show. And sorry, David, but you didn’t win our prize. However, anytime you’d like to be brought up-to-date on why BPEL is at the heart of SOA development, we’re happy to update you so you can win the next time.
Tags: BPEL, BPEL4People, BPM, BPMN, linthicum, ws-human task
June 19th, 2008 at 5:06 am
BPEL rocks … not for being portable, being XML, or being a standard, etc … but the way it is structured and designed. KEep up the good work with Active VOS .. its a great product
June 23rd, 2008 at 7:17 pm
[...] was made aware of this response from Alex Neihaus of Active Endpoints on the VOSibilities blog to a podcast and post from David [...]
October 25th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Sounds as if someone, a fraud, doesn’t know what he is talking about. Not being too bright is OK, but one should know it and not pretend to be otherwise.
October 25th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
We post all comments, except for obvious spam. I am not sure that Steve expected this when he wrote the comment above since he might have expected that by being insulting, I’d get angry and delete his comment. Some people do that, you know…they think because you require a userid to post a comment — which means you review them — that you’ll get petulant and only post what you like.
Instead, I am happy to approve it and post it to the blog. You decide if we’re “not too bright” and “a fraud” for yourself.