VOSibilities » CTO Tuesdays

CTO Tuesdays #54: Is BPMN for Business Users?

Clive Bearman — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 16:54:15 +0000

BPMN was designed for the general modeling (and documenting) the processes of businesses, and in this episode of CTO Tuesdays, Dr. Michael Rowley discussed the kinds of people who are most likely to be successful at using the constructs. He argued that general purpose concepts of BPMN process modeling are probably too much for the typical business user, but proposed that BPMN can be used ONLY if the problem is significantly narrowed down. He explained that this is the exact approach that drove the Socrates design requirements. Michael then described how Socrates narrows the scope and uses a small subset of BPMN that business users can easily manage. To further illustrate his point, he demonstrated the creation of screenflows with a subset of BPMN. Michael also briefly demonstrated some of the more sophisticated BPMN capabilities and explained why they are needed for general purpose process modeling.

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CTO Tuesdays #54: Is BPMN for Business Users?

CTO Tuesdays #53: Simplifying data usage with Socrates

Clive Bearman — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 19:02:27 +0000

In previous episodes, Michael Rowley explained how Socrates simplifies the design of screenflows through the innovative concept of guidance trees. In this episode, Michael demonstrated how Socrates also simplifies how the data is used. We saw how Socrates screenflows could call automated steps, but unlike technologies that have come before, did not require the designer to map input and output parameters to variables. This unique approach allowed the domain expert to focus on creating the guidance tree logic and delegated the complexity of data mapping to the developer instead.

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CTO Tuesdays #53: Simplifying data usage with Socrates

CTO Tuesdays #52: Guidance Trees: A New Design Paradigm

Clive Bearman — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:12:10 +0000

In this episode of CTO Tuesdays, Michael Rowley debated how guidance trees offered a new paradigm for creating guided applications. He discussed what could be done with a guidance tree and explained how the metaphor simplified the design process over other approaches such as workflow and process modeling. Michael also demonstrated how the new paradigm could be leveraged in a powerful yet elegant manner to simplify the creation and manipulation of these trees. We ended the session with a very lively Q&A with the audience offering lots of comments, questions and viewpoints.

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CTO Tuesdays #52: Guidance Trees: A New Design Paradigm

CTO Tuesdays #51: Is Screenflow a Business Process?

Clive Bearman — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 20:09:52 +0000

In episode 50 of CTO Tuesday Michael Rowley introduced Socrates, a new technology for creating Screenflows and demonstrated the guidance trees used to create them. In this episode, Michael postulated whether screenflows really are “business processes”. It’s not surprising to discover that the answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no. During the talk, Michael spent time diving into Socrates and how screenflows could be integrated with what would be unhesitatingly called a business processes.

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CTO Tuesdays #51: Is Screenflow a Business Process?

CTO Tuesdays #50: An Introduction to Socrates

Clive Bearman — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 21:31:04 +0000

CTO Tuesdays reached a significant milestone this week with its 50th episode. So to commemorate this occasion Michael Rowley unveiled a brand new product called Socrates. This innovative product was designed to enable business users and domain experts to build simple, yet powerful web applications that guide to successful outcomes. These applications can be used for troubleshooting, diagnostics, up sell promotions or refund processes. In fact Socrates is useful for any customer service situation that requires a user to ask questions and receive answers in order to reach a good resolution. So sit back and watch how Michael effortlessly puts the product through its paces during its world premiere.

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CTO Tuesdays #50: An Introduction to Socrates

CTO Tuesdays #49: Approval Task Patterns

Clive Bearman — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 19:13:11 +0000

Approvals are one of the most common tasks performed by people in every organization and can range from a simple single person, sequential approval, to a complex parallel group voting process. The WS-HumanTask specification doesn’t explicitly describe how different types of approval patterns can be implemented. In this episode Michael explained how these different types of approval patterns can be supported. Michael also demonstrated how to use the ActiveVOS designer, the WS-HumanTask activity and the ActiveVOS Central task list system to show you how it’s done!

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CTO Tuesdays #49: Approval Task Patterns

CTO Tuesdays #48: Collaboration and Delegation with WS-HumanTask

Clive Bearman — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:03:56 +0000

The WS-HumanTask standard doesn’t explicitly talk about how people can work together on a task or how someone can delegate another person to temporarily work on all of their tasks. However, these situations were considered during the development of WS-HumanTask specification and there are features in the standard that were designed to support them. In this week’s episode, Michael Rowley described how collaboration and delegation can be supported using the WS-HumanTask standard and demonstrated how it works using the ActiveVOS Central task list system.

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CTO Tuesdays #48: Collaboration and Delegation with WS-HumanTask

CTO Tuesdays #47: Compensation

Clive Bearman — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 14:14:05 +0000

In this week’s episode, Michael covered one of the most widely requested topics of the CTO Tuesdays series and discussed how to use compensating transactions for long-running business processes. In addition to comparing and contrasting transaction managers with BPMS’s, he also showed how to use compensating processes to undo work when things invariably go wrong. As always the episode ended with a lively Q&A session with great participation from the audience.

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CTO Tuesdays #47: Compensation

CTO Tuesdays #46: ESBs and BPMSs

Clive Bearman — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 21:55:42 +0000

In this week’s episode of CTO Tuesdays, Michael Rowley did an excellent job comparing and contrasting scenarios for using ESBs and BPMSs. He provided answers to many popular questions including: if you have a service-oriented BPMS, do you also need an ESB? Are ESBs completely unnecessary? Michael explored situations where BPMS functionality is all that’s needed and where it was appropriate to use an ESB. So whether you own both of these technologies, just investigating one or the other, or looking to leverage the best attributes of each, then I’d strongly suggest watching this episode.

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CTO Tuesdays #46: ESBs and BPMSs

CTO Tuesdays #45: Authorizing Access to Business Processes

Clive Bearman — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 13:57:45 +0000

An important aspect of business processes is who is allowed to start them. Not everyone is allowed to initiate every kind of process, and it is not just a matter of presentation. If you aren’t allowed to start a process, there should be no way of going around the UI in order to kick it off anyway. Proper authorization should be guaranteed at runtime. In this week’s episode, Michael Rowley discusses different strategies for process authorization. He describes standard authorization features that support simple authorization tests as well as architectural patterns that can be used to support more complex authorization scenarios.

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CTO Tuesdays #45: Authorizing Access to Business Processes

CTO Tuesdays #44: Expression Languages for Business Processes

Clive Bearman — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 16:51:37 +0000

In this week’s episode, Michael delivered a great introduction to the different types of expression languages for business processes. He explained how a business process works with data through expression languages to determine which paths to execute in a decision gateway. As a result, answering high-level questions like “was the requested loan a large one?” simply became a matter of evaluating process variables. He also explained the advantages and disadvantages of the most common expression language choices: XQuery, XPath and JavaScript. He finished the session with a demonstration on how both BPMN and BPEL allowed the process designer to use a mix of expression languages while building the process and running a simulation.

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CTO Tuesdays #44: Expression Languages for Business Processes

CTO Tuesdays #43: Creating Test Suites for Business Processes

Clive Bearman — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 12:49:16 +0000

In this episode of “CTO Tuesdays” Michael described how to use test suites to ensure that our critical business processes continued to work as expected over time. The key to success was to take a leaf from the book of software engineering and regression testing best practices. This is because an executable business process is just like any other form of good code after all. Business processes should therefore have tests that guarantee they work as expected the first time, and suites of tests to ensure that changes to processes do not unintentionally break working aspects. Michael also explained both black box and white box testing approaches that should be used when we develop and deploy any business process.

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CTO Tuesdays #43: Creating Test Suites for Business Processes

CTO Tuesdays #42: Should you bet on jBPM?

Michael Rowley — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 16:47:49 +0000

In this edition of CTO Tuesdays, I looked at jBPM and asked the kinds of questions that I believe architects and project managers should ask before betting a project on jBPM technology. I started the talk with a quick discussion of how I chose the version of jBPM to evaluate. I ended up choosing jBPM v3, since jBPM v4 will never be productized and jBPM v5 isn’t done yet.

jBPM v3 is a mature technology that has continued to get new releases, so it seems to be the most relevant. The kinds of issues I looked into included the following:

Is jBPM well suited to a service-oriented architecture?
What is jPDL good at and what is it bad at?
Once you’ve created a model, how hard is it to get the process to execute?
Does jBPM’s “Process Virtual Machine” protect your investment in any way?
How easy is it to include human tasks in process? Do they use standardized technology?

These and other questions are addressed as I provide a high-level look at jBPM 3 technology.

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CTO Tuesdays #42: Should you bet on jBPM?

CTO Tuesdays #41: Why GO TO is Good for Business Processes

Michael Rowley — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 17:54:58 +0000

In this episode of CTO Tuesdays, I talked about the similarity between sequence flows (arrows) in a business process and the old GO TO statement from programming languages. In 1968 Edsger W. Dijkstra published a letter titled “Go-to statement considered harmful,” which marked the beginning of a movement within software engineering toward structured programming. Since that time, virtually all programming languages have encouraged a structured development style over the kind of “spaghetti code” that can result from using GO TO statements – until BPM. An executable business process is a program, by any reasonable definition of the word, but the sequence flow of BPMN (the arrow) is essentially a GO TO statement. In this talk, I explained why this is a good thing for business processes, and not the “harmful” thing that Dijkstra saw in the programs of his day.

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CTO Tuesdays #41: Why GO TO is Good for Business Processes

CTO Tuesdays #40: Single Sign On for Accessing Task Lists

Michael Rowley — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 15:32:15 +0000

In this episode of CTO Tuesdays, I talked about single sign on (SSO) and how the application that presents task lists to users should be able to fit into a SSO framework. The benefits of SSO are larger than just the convenience to users, including greater security and lower support costs. The talk also described the technology involved in SSO, including a brief introduction to public-key cryptography, transport level security, digital signatures, certificates and other security technologies. The choreography of messages involved in SSO was also described.

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CTO Tuesdays #40: Single Sign On for Accessing Task Lists

CTO Tuesdays #39: Synchronous Web Services as Process Automation

Michael Rowley — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 20:29:20 +0000

In this week’s CTO Tuesday’s webcast, I argued (and demonstrated) that any web service that is created using calls to other web services, even when the service being created is entirely synchronous, is best created using a BPEL-based BPMS (preferably with BPMN 2.0 notation). I also briefly talked about the additional advantages that occur when the process isn’t synchronous or when it involves human workflow.

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CTO Tuesdays #39: Synchronous Web Services as Process Automation

CTO Tuesdays #38: Organizing and Searching Tasks in a WS-Human Task Worklist System

Michael Rowley — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 21:42:23 +0000

In this week’s CTO Tuesday I discussed how WS-HumanTask standardizes the concepts and APIs for worklist systems. These concepts provide some organizational and searching capabilities, but also provide extensibility points to allow vendors to add additional capabilities in these areas.

The talk reviews the basic architecture of WS-HumanTask and describes the things in the standard that allow users to organize task lists or search for individual tasks. New ActiveVOS 8.0 capabilities for organizing and searching for tasks are also covered.

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CTO Tuesdays #38: Organizing and Searching Tasks in a WS-Human Task Worklist System

CTO Tuesdays #37: Versioning the process deployments in a SOA

Michael Rowley — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 21:03:49 +0000

Handling versioning issues correctly in a service-oriented architecture is hard to do right. It is easy to inadvertently deploy new versions of schemas, WSDLs or process definitions that interfere with existing working services. In this week’s CTO Tuesday, I described an approach to versioning that makes it much easier to avoid such conflicts. Using the concept of contribution, from the OASIS standard called SCA, it is possible to deploy a new version of a process and all of its related artifacts without any danger of breaking older versions of processes that are continuing to run. In this talk, I described the contribution mechanism in general and how it is used for handling versioning in ActiveVOS 8.0.

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CTO Tuesdays #37: Versioning the process deployments in a SOA

CTO Tuesdays #36: Using BPMN’s Swimlanes

Michael Rowley — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 22:27:56 +0000

In this CTO Tuesday episode, I describe BPMN’s concept of swimlanes for representing who performs the activities shown in a business process. Typically, the label on the activities only describes what is done by the activity, rather than who does it. In this talk, I describe how the general concept of a “swimlane” is represented in BPMN by two different concepts: pools and lanes. I describe the differences between these two concepts, the best practices for their use, and show you how to work with them in version 8.0 of the ActiveVOS process designer tool.

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CTO Tuesdays #36: Using BPMN’s Swimlanes

CTO Tuesdays #35: Boundary events in BPMN 2.0

Michael Rowley — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:43:06 +0000

This talk describes BPMN’s concept of boundary events, how they should be used, and how they are related to events that are in the normal sequence flow and to event subprocesses. I also describe the difference between interrupting and non-interrupting boundary events and how processes that use boundary events are mapped to BPEL.

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CTO Tuesdays #35: Boundary events in BPMN 2.0

CTO Tuesdays #34: XPath – The Unsung Hero of Service-Oriented BPM

Michael Rowley — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:11:36 +0000

Service-oriented BPM is all about using and providing services. Even tasks done by people are modeled as services. Services use and return XML documents. This means that every decision, every loop condition and generally every use of data has to be able to pull the appropriate data out of XML documents. This is the job of XPath. Many people only have a rudimentary knowledge is XPath, letting their tools generate it for them, but a more complete understanding of the language can help you make simpler processes and allow you a greater understanding is what is going on at runtime. Use the links below to either view a recording of this episode of CTO Tuesdays or just read the slides (the last link).

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CTO Tuesdays #34: XPath – The Unsung Hero of Service-Oriented BPM

CTO Tuesdays #33: Is REST Right for BPM?

Michael Rowley — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 18:18:42 +0000

In this week’s CTO Tuesday, I addressed the question of whether the architectural style called “REST” is well suited to BPM. I’ll save you the suspense and tell you the answer is no. That isn’t to say that ActiveVOS doesn’t support REST. It does. But if you have a choice, should you follow that style? That is where the answer is no.

Contrary to many of the APIs that call themselves REST-based, REST means more than using HTTP GET to call the service and getting plain XML documents back as results. The talk describes the five key principals of REST, including the most important one, which is called HATEOAS. It is an interesting principal that works well for the Web, but it is antithetical to design-time type checking. In fact the REST style is, in general, in conflict with any kind of design-time typing (Roy Fielding refers to typing as “out-of-band” information that creates a tight coupling between client and server).

However, design-time typing is just part of a well-defined service contract and good service contracts are one of the most important characteristics of a service-oriented architecture. I describe this more fully in the talk and also describe the critical value of design-time typing for BPM. I also show how fragile business processes become when they have to depend on REST.

You can view the talk using one of the formats below or just look at the slides (the PDF at the bottom).

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CTO Tuesdays #33: Is REST Right for BPM?

CTO Tuesdays #32: BPM Standards Update

Michael Rowley — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 15:07:57 +0000

A number of standards efforts related to BPM are nearing completion of major milestones. This includes 4 standards efforts in 3 different standards development organizations:

OASIS: BPEL4People 1.1 and WS-HumanTask 1.1
OMG: BPMN 2.0
WfMC: XPDL 2.2
OASIS: SCA 1.1

In this week’s CTO Tuesdays, I describe the current state of each of these efforts along with a brief description of the history and main goals of these standards. Here is a recording of the presentation and a copy of the slides.

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CTO Tuesdays #32: BPM Standards Update

CTO Tuesdays #31: SOA — from concept to SOAP opera, part 2

Michael Rowley — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 21:37:51 +0000

In this recording of CTO Tuesdays, I describe the history of the key standards that are important for SOA, such as XML (starting back with SGML), XML Schema, SOAP, WSDL and BPEL. I also describe some of the key architectural characteristics of SOA that drove the standards, as well as some of the standards-making politics that was peculiar to service-oriented standards. If you are curious about the history of SOA and its related standards, you may find this talk to be interesting.

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CTO Tuesdays #31: SOA — from concept to SOAP opera, part 2

CTO Tuesdays #30: SOA — from concept to SOAP opera, part 1

Alex — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 17:00:43 +0000

In this recording of CTO Tuesdays, the BPMS podcast, Michael Rowley describes how we got here — taking a special look at previous attempts to solve some core development problems. Whatever your interest: SOA, BPM, application development, even just a passing historical curiosity, you will want to watch this (and future) episodes.

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CTO Tuesdays #30: SOA — from concept to SOAP opera, part 1

Next on “CTO Tuesdays:” SOA – from concept to SOAP opera

Alex — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 15:46:58 +0000

OK, OK…I know. The pun on SOAP and soap opera is a little much. But doesn’t the SOA world feel like a never-ending, overwrought daytime TV drama?

I mean, c’mon. Nobody can decide if SOA is dead or alive…if it’s a product (or set of products) or if it’s JBOI (just a bunch of ideas, a pun on “JBOD.” I just can’t help myself.).

So, starting tomorrow on CTO Tuesdays, the BPM podcast, Michael Rowley will begin another “miniseries” within the larger podcast that begins with the very basics of SOA and builds over time to paint a complete picture of this much discussed and often misunderstood development approach. We intend this as a primer for both new and expert users and we are excited that the recurring SOA topics will expand CTO Tuesdays’ regular line-up of BPM technology talks.

Register for CTO Tuesdays at http://www.activevos.com/ctot and, as always, you can return to this blog for replays. But we hope you can join us live because we expect the discussion after Michael’s presentation on these topics to be very lively and we hope to have you join in the discussion.

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Next on “CTO Tuesdays:” SOA – from concept to SOAP opera

CTO Tuesdays #29: Oracle’s misguided approach to BPMN and BPEL

Alex — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 17:00:28 +0000

If you’ve been attending the live recordings of CTO Tuesdays, our BPM podcast, and/or watching the replays, you know that we have stuck to our knitting for the most part: detailed technical discussions of BPM technology.

Starting with last week’s CTO Tuesdays and continuing with the episode posted below, we have increased our range to crucial technical decisions for BPM users which may have very long-term effects.

We are, to put it bluntly, very concerned that the marketplace is receiving — and accepting — incorrect information about the real relationship between BPEL and BPMN 2.0. Last week, Michael Rowley dispelled this myth in the abstract. This week, Michael has gone further: he actually shows what a two-toolset, two-engine BPMS environment with only a fig-leaf of integration looks like, using Oracle’s BPM Suite 11g and SOA Suite 11g as the poster children.

Yes, Oracle is a competitor. And yes, we have a “dog in the hunt,” as they say. Therefore, for sure, we have an opinion.

None of that undoes the fact that users should consider alternative points of view — views based, as we attempt to do, on the exact text and meaning of the BPMN 2.0 specification. And the fact that we have an opinion — and a product based on that belief — doesn’t undo the fact that much of the argument that BPMN should execute directly and that BPEL is passe is as self-serving as anything we may say.

So, I urge you to watch the replay of CTO Tuesdays attached to this post and to consider the alternative arguments we make. We’re not going to convince everybody, but we truly believe that the people who do consider their long-term BPMS strategy will find that BPMN as notation with BPEL execution is the better alternative.

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CTO Tuesdays #29: Oracle’s misguided approach to BPMN and BPEL

CTO Tuesdays #28: Debunking the myth of conflict between BPMN and BPEL

Alex — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:01:10 +0000

If you follow Active Endpoints and ActiveVOS on the web and/or in social media, you know we aren’t timid about…well…anything. We try hard, however, to make sure that as we forcefully make our points we are backing them up not just with emotion (a remarkably clarifying attribute often missing vendors’ discussions of technology) but also with hard facts.

You can see the very best of that loud-but-authentic aesthetic at work in episode 28 of CTO Tuesdays, the BPM podcast.

For too long — and, frankly, for reasons that mystify me — some voices have spoken of a “conflict” between BPMN and BPEL. It has always seemed to me that those points of view — that BPMN 2.0 is somehow a “successor” or “replacment” for BPEL – have an agenda that’s more about their preferred results in the marketplace than about the “best” or the “right” thing for users. IOW, politicking is at play.

But, as we all know, in politics, negative campaigning works. “BPEL is dead;” “BPMN 2.0 execution obviates BPEL.” These misstatements have gained far more attention than they deserve. They have escalated to the level of myth — or worse, conventional wisdom — both of which can have lives very separate from reality.

Our response: BPMN 2.0 is better with BPEL execution for users for a plethora of reasons. Far from dead, BPEL’s fundamental mistake of not specifying a visual notation is cured by BPMN 2.0. And BPMN 2.0 achieves its highest likelihood of success when coupled with BPEL execution.

Still, the myth that these two crucial standards are in conflict persists. Watch this podcast replay to see and hear Michael Rowley debunk these myths — passionately and accurately.

And be sure to join us next week for episode 29, titled “Oracle’s misguided approach to BPMN and BPEL” for even more myth-busting. Register at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

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CTO Tuesdays #28: Debunking the myth of conflict between BPMN and BPEL

Next week on “CTO Tuesdays:” Busting the myth of BPMN vs. BPEL

Alex — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:20:23 +0000

Next Tuesday, June 22, at noon EDT, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley will present “Debunking the myth of conflict between BPMN and BPEL.”

In this talk, Michael will address the fact that some people believe that there is a conflict between using BPMN and BPEL for business processes. He will show how in the latest 2.0 version of the BPMN standard, substantial work has been done to bring the two into alignment and how, according to the latest public draft of the standard, “complete conformance” for BPMN actually requires that it be executable using BPEL.

As they say, you’ve heard the rest…now come listen to the best. We are going to clear the air for users about this myth, which has sometimes been perpetrated by folks with an agenda for BPMN that’s different from what the standard actually intends.

But I do want to encourage you to join us for the recording of the June 22 podcast because the discussion is sure to be lively. Plus, you’ll want to be caught up on podcasts because the next podcast after this one will be even more incendiary. Michael will be nominating a poster child for a poor approach to integrating BPMN and BPEL: Oracle BPM Suite 11g.

So, that’s two not-to-be-missed episodes of CTO Tuesdays that’ll “hot up” your summer. Who’s made you a better offer lately?

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Next week on “CTO Tuesdays:” Busting the myth of BPMN vs. BPEL

CTO Tuesdays #27: BPMS and disaster recovery

Alex — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:00:13 +0000

We are pleased to present the recording of the 27th episode of CTO Tuesdays, the BPM podcast from Active Endpoints.

In this talk, Michael Rowley, Active Endpoints’ CTO discusses how a business process management suite (BPMS) can provide the infrastructure necessary to survive serious disruptions.

There are several previous CTO Tuesdays episodes which are related to this topic and which you might also find interesting:

Together, these podcasts make a compelling case that BPM-style development has the features and capabilities necessary for enterprises to be comfortable placing their most crucial processes on BPM suites.

Please register for next week’s live recording of the podcast at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

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CTO Tuesdays #27: BPMS and disaster recovery

Next week on “CTO Tuesdays:” BPMS and disaster recovery

Alex — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 20:46:49 +0000

Next Tuesday, June 15, at 1pm EDT (10am PDT, 17:00 GMT) our next edition of CTO Tuesdays, the BPM podcast, will present “BPMSs and Disaster Recovery”

Running a BPMS in a cluster of machines can help a system continue to operate even when a single machine goes down, but what can you do if an entire data center goes offline? In this talk, Michael Rowley, Active Endpoints’ CTO, will describe a deployment option that permits the BPMS runs in multiple geographically distributed clusters so that the loss of a data center does not prevent access to the BPMS. Michael will also describe how such a configuration can also be used to handle increased loads when all sites are online.

Register for CTO Tuesdays here: http://www.activevos.com/ctot. Please note our special time this week. Instead of noon EDT (9am PDT), we are holding the live recording of the podcast at 1pm EDT (10am PDT).

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Next week on “CTO Tuesdays:” BPMS and disaster recovery

CTO Tuesdays #26: Eliminating the presentation tier

Alex — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 17:00:22 +0000

Episode 26 of CTO Tuesdays, the BPM podcast, is a must see.

Michael Rowley discusses how WS-HumanTask, coupled with capabilities provided by JSON and AJAX make it possible to eliminate presentation tier services on application servers for worklist management and process initiation in BPMSs.

It’s a look into how the browser, courtesy of AJAX techniques, has become so powerful for presentation logic that it has obviated the need for extra server-side work. While that may not be the latest news, what is fascinating is the application of these capabilities to BPM — and the inside look at the protocol enabled by the move of presentation logic to the client.

A note: I had a problem with the recoding of this podcast. The bad news is for the first couple of minutes, you’ll hear me give my welcome and introduction to the webinar, but you won’t see my PowerPoint slides. The good news is, once Michael begins his talk, you will see everything perfectly.

Update: During the Q&A in this episode, a user asks about parsing JSON on the server side. One of our engineers, PJ, heard that question and offers this answer:

Here’s a link to the JSON specs and libs and links to for parsing in Java, C, C++, ASP, PHP, etc.: http://json.org/

In ActiveVOS, you do not need to parse JSON because it is automatically converted to XML by the ActiveVOS engine and passed into the Receive (or onEvent) activity in your process. So, in ActiveVOS, one works with XML using XQuery & XPath.

For those using REST based services and want to parse JSON or respond with JSON, they can use the following extension functions:abx:jsonToXml(jsonStr) -> returns XML element
abx:xmlToJson(xmlElement) -> return JSON string

For more information, in ActiveVOS’s Expression dialog picklist, see Functions->BPEL->ActiveVOS->JSON

PJ also notes that we have documentation on using JSON in ActiveVOS at http://www.activevos.com/dev/sdks/XML-JSON-Binding/docs/Part1-ActiveVOS-XML-JSON-API.html and sample code in our SDKs at http://www.activevos.com/developers-sdks.php.

Thanks, PJ.

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CTO Tuesdays #26: Eliminating the presentation tier

Next week on “CTO Tuesdays:” Eliminating the presentation tier

Alex — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:21:23 +0000

On the next episode of CTO Tuesdays, the BPM podcast, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley will discuss how to eliminate the presentation tier when access worklists.

Typical web applications have a service tier and a presentation tier on the application server. However, AJAX technologies have made it possible to move more presentation logic to the web browser. Michael will describe how ActiveVOS has used these techniques to completely eliminate the presentation tier for our worklist application.

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Next week on “CTO Tuesdays:” Eliminating the presentation tier

CTO Tuesdays #25: BPM 911 – how a BPMS calls for help

Alex — Wed, 26 May 2010 17:00:20 +0000

On CTO Tuesdays #25, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley discusses BPMS alert monitors and services which can be used when the BPMS detects issues in running processes.

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CTO Tuesdays #25: BPM 911 – how a BPMS calls for help

CTO Tuesdays #24: How to be prepared for services that might go down

Alex — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:00:22 +0000

On episode #24 of CTO Tuesdays, the BPM podcast, Michael Rowley delivers a very interesting talk on how to manage services that might be unavailable when your process is running. A modern BPMS consists of web services running “all over the place” — which might make you think given the vicissitudes of networks and applications, building a robust BPM process application would be difficult, if not impossible.

But in this BPM podcast, you’ll see how well-thought-out BPMSs tackle this very fundamental problem — and how easy it can be to manage “problem” services. In fact, there’s so much choice in both design and deployment of BPM applications, next week’s CTO Tuesdays will expand on the ideas presented in this episode.

Be sure to watch this episode if you are working with a BPMS — and join us for part 2 next week. Register at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

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CTO Tuesdays #24: How to be prepared for services that might go down

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Alex — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:43:34 +0000

Tomorrow on CTO Tuesdays #24, Michael Rowley will cover the crucial topic of what to do when a web service that is required by a process application isn’t available. Register for the webinar here.

We’ve long argued that processes defined using a BPM (business process management) discipline which are automated should be developed using a services-based environment. But what happens when those services aren’t available? Join us on Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at noon EDT, 9am PDT, 16:00 GMT to explore your BPMS options for this eventuality.

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CTO Tuesdays #23: Escalation – what to do when something doesn’t happen

Alex — Wed, 12 May 2010 17:02:51 +0000

This episode of CTO Tuesdays details with how escalation works in a BPMS. In particular, the discussion and demonstration tackle how to use process-leveland task-level escalation, including deadlines, in the design and deployment of processes.

As always, you can join us live for CTO Tuesdays by signing up at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

We hope you will join us.

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CTO Tuesdays #23: Escalation – what to do when something doesn’t happen

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Alex — Mon, 10 May 2010 13:50:39 +0000

Tomorrow on CTO Tuesdays #23, we will explore how a business process management system (BPMS) handles escalation. Register for this episode at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

We hope you can join us at noon EDT, 9am PDT, 16:00 GMT for our discussion of this important topic. When you consider the kinds of core processes that BPM systems are used for — processes which almost always include human tasks — being able to escalate work when something doesn’t happen is an important capability.

As always, Michael Rowley, Active Endpoints’ CTO, will present an educational overview of escalation followed by a panel discussion to answer your questions.

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CTO Tuesdays #22: Complex correlation scenarios

Alex — Wed, 05 May 2010 17:00:29 +0000

In the loosely-coupled world of today’s process applications, how does the BPMS know which running process instance to route incoming messages to? It’s an important question…and one CTO Tuesdays has explored before (see CTOT #5 on engine-managed correlation).

In this episode, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley tackles a more complex case for correlation: when you can’t use engine-managed correlation because the developer doesn’t have control of the client in a business process. This episode reviews the terms used in correlation and then walks through a simplified procurement process to illustrate the concept.

As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions. And we hope you will be able to join us for the live recording of CTO Tuesdays ever Tuesday at noon ET.

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CTO Tuesdays #22: Complex correlation scenarios

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Alex — Mon, 03 May 2010 15:36:28 +0000

Correlation sets in BPEL allow designers to manage asynchronous conversations in their business processes. Correlations sets are both a simple idea and very useful. By design, BPEL engines can manage a wide range of situations automatically, as we explored in CTOT #5: Engine-managed correlations. But what can designers and developers do when things get more complicated?

That’s what we’ll explore on CTO Tuesdays for Tuesday, May 4, 2010. We’ll be discussing more complicated correlation examples and offer tips and techniques for using BPEL correlation to support a very wide range of processes.

Please join us at noon ET, 9am PT and 16:00 GMT. You can register to watch the podcast live and participate in the Q&A discussion by registering at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

We look forward to seeing you on the podcast.

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CTO Tuesdays #21: Building business processes with mainframe inclusion

Alex — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 17:00:41 +0000

Well, I’ve been waiting a very long time to write a blog post that mentions that in the ABC TV series “Lost” the famous hatch where the button had to be pushed every 108 minutes had some very retro, old-school tech in it.

After searching and searching, I finally found a still on a fan website from the show’s second season that clearly shows a pair of IBM 3420 mainframe tape drives. Say what?

The Dharma Initiative was using IBM mainframe technology on the island in 1974? What did they need data storage for? Why are the tape drives always empty? What do those cool lights shining up from the bottom of the unit mean? (There were no lights there on the original 3420s.) How come I am the only person to have noticed these antiques in the hatch? (OK, not the only one. But a lot more people are wondering about the meaning of the smoke monster, or whether the Island is Hell — and all I want to know is what OS they were running on these things..MVS, VSE or the progenitor of all things virtual, VM/370.)

Lemme tell ya, these babies could store up to 150MB per 10″ tape reel! And to speed access, the drive “sucked” the tape down into the vacuum columns you can see on either side of the lighted area on the bottom of the tape drive. And, believe it or not, these things “burped” when you unloaded them — which depending on the version of the operating system the mainframe was running, sometimes had to be done manually.

So, what’s all this have to do with the content of CTO Tuesdays #21? Easy: for all the jokes about outdated mainframe(rs) and their never-very-cool reputation compared to the then-nascent PC, mainframes matter. They mattered then…and, to the surprise of no one who’s ever worked on them, they matter today.

On this episode of CTO Tuesdays, Michael Rowley turns the con over to Rob Morris and Dusty Rivers of GT Software, who describe an elegant and practical way of linking everything on a mainframe — CICS transactions, IMS queues, VSAM keyed datasets, raw 3270 data streams…you name it — to a modern BPMS like ActiveVOS. This is done via standard web services, using WSDLs to define available mainframe services.

Simply, if you have mainframe technology in your organization (and, frankly if you are in financial services, telecommunications and/or entertainment & media, we’d bet you do) and you want to write business processes that live up to the promise of flexibly integrating both people and systems, you gotta watch this podcast.

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CTO Tuesdays #21: Building business processes with mainframe inclusion

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Alex — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:13:22 +0000

Tomorrow on CTO Tuesdays #21 for April 27, 2010, we are pleased to present a topic that is on everyone’s lips: how to integrate mainframe systems like CICS, IMS and 3270 apps into a the new world of process applications.

Our guests tomorrow are Rob Morris and Dusty Rivers of GT Software who will show how web services can quickly and easily integrate these two worlds.

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CTO Tuesdays #20 : Using REST for business processes

Alex — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 06:17:57 +0000

Attached to this post are the recordings and a PDF of the slides presented on CTO Tuesdays #20 for 13 April 2010.

Completing a “trilogy” of sorts that started with CTOT #18 and continued in CTOT #19, Michael Rowley covers the concepts — and politics — behind REST, the representational state transfer protocol.

This episode is a must-see for anyone interested in protocols and comparing and contrasting REST with SOAP.

We promised to include this link to the WS-* standards that was shown in the discussion: http://www.innoq.com/soa/ws-standards/poster/innoQ%20WS-Standards%20Poster%202007-02.pdf

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CTO Tuesdays #20 : Using REST for business processes

Tomorrow on CTO Tuesdays #20 for April 13, 2010: Using REST in BPM

Alex — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 13:31:01 +0000

Our topic tomorrow is “Using REST with business processes.”

REST (for “representational state transfer“) has become a popular style of creating applications in a services-oriented environment. But many development teams are less familiar with REST than they could be. On CTO Tuesdays for April 13, 2010, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley will provide an easy-to-understand overview of REST and show examples of its use. Register at http://www.activevos.com/ctot to join for this exciting look at REST. CTO Tuesdays is presented live at noon ET, 9am PT, 16:00 GMT.

CTO Tuesdays is a weekly podcast about the technology of BPM. Each week CTO Tuesdays tackles a single technical topic and delivers the education development teams want to learn how to create a new generation of process applications. Register for the next episode of CTO Tuesdays here.”

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CTO Tuesdays #19: Using URNs to avoid hard-coding service locations

Alex — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 17:00:09 +0000

Attached to this post are the recordings of CTO Tuesdays #19 for 6 April 2010.

In this very interesting episode, Michael Rowley covers the (somewhat sad) history of URNs (complete with a screen shot of the entire web, circa 1991). Rowley then details how and why URNs are useful in process applications. A panel discussion follows the formal presentation.

Next week on CTOT: Rowley completes the story arc he started on CTOT #18 (using email-based approvals for processes) and which continued in CTOT #19 with a discussion of REST — the representational state transfer protocol. Don’t miss it: register at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

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CTO Tuesdays #19: Using URNs to avoid hard-coding service locations

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Alex — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 18:36:30 +0000

Tomorrow, 6 April 2010, CTO Tuesdays will cover the use of uniform resource names (URNs) in deployed processes.

Forgive the unfortunate pun, but your urn will runneth over with excitement as you learn how URNs make it easy to model and deploy processes that do not have hard-coded physical service locations embedded in them.

We hope you can join us.

What is CTO Tuesdays?

CTO Tuesdays is about the technology of BPM. Because Active Endpoints believes that people need to change the way they do things, it’s up to us to help them understand what they need to in order to have them welcome that change. BPM technology is a new thing for many people…and we have an obligation to educate users about this new way of thinking and doing. So, each week we tackle a single topic in some depth – but limit the technical discussion to 30 minutes or so. The idea is to give people enough to tickle their curiosity and allow them to explore more on their own. 30 minutes is about right because, once you strip away the novelty, BPM concepts are just not that hard. The BPM technical talk is followed by a lively panel Q&A. CTO Tuesdays is not an ActiveVOS commercial – though when we illustrate a concept in the podcast, we obviously use ActiveVOS.

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CTO Tuesdays #18: Handling approvals by email in business processes

Alex — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:00:36 +0000

Episode 18 of CTO Tuesdays, the BPMS podcast, covers using email for simpler workflows. Michael Rowley compares and contrasts using worklist management versus email for certain kinds of tasks and makes recommendations on when to use a BPMS’s worklist capabilities and when email might be acceptable. A sample application is demonstrated that shows using email-based workflow for a very simple vacation/time-off approval process.

Be sure to join us live for CTO Tuesdays every Tuesday at noon ET, 9am PT, 16:00 GMT. Register here: http://www.activevos.com/ctot. Next week’s topic (CTO Tuesdays #19 for April 6, 2010) will be “Using URNs to avoid hard-coding service locations.”

If you watch the replay of #18, you’ll see that Michael is using URNs in the most classical way: to map logical names in the business process to physical URLs in the real world. Based on the feedback we got about this, Michael has decided to devote an entire episode to URNs in business processes.

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CTO Tuesdays #18: Handling approvals by email in business processes

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Alex — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:44:00 +0000

The topic for CTO Tuesdays, the BPMS podcast, for Tuesday, March 30, 2010 is “Email-based approvals in a BPMS.”

One of the most common tasks in business processes is to request that something be approved or denied. In some cases, it is appropriate to request approvals by email rather than require that the approver log into a task management system. This talk will show how to include such approval tasks in business processes.

What is CTO Tuesdays?

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CTO Tuesdays #17: How BPMSs support long-running business transactions

Alex — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:00:48 +0000

Episode 17 of CTO Tuesdays covers BPMS support for long-running business transactions and compensation. Michael Rowley compares and contrasts BPMS support for transactions with that of transaction managers and describes how compensation can be applied to business transactions.

This episode is the second of two on persistence and compensation. If you haven’t seen the previous episode, you might find it interesting to review before watching this one.

Four files are attached to this post. Three are video recordings of the podcast in different formats; the fourth is a PDF of the slides Rowley presented.

Please be sure to sign up for our next CTO Tuesdays, scheduled for March 30, 2010 at noon ET. The topic will be “Handling approvals by email in business processes.”

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CTO Tuesdays #17: How BPMSs support long-running business transactions

CTO Tuesdays #16: The state of BPMS state: persistence for process

Alex — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:00:22 +0000

This time on CTO Tuesdays, the BPMS podcast, we discuss what persistence of state offers process developers and BPM users. Michael Rowely, host of the podcast and CTO at Active Endpoints discusses what persistence is, how it works and what the potential performance costs might be.

We hope you enjoy this podcast. We’d love to hear your feedback on the series. Just email us or leave a comment here.

Remember: sign up for next week’s CTO Tuesdays here. We will be expanding on persistence to talk about BPMS support for long-running transactions.

Update 3/17: in case you missed the second part, you can watch the replay here.

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CTO Tuesdays #16: The state of BPMS state: persistence for process