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.

What can IT project teams do to show how to add value quickly to automate business processes, and use advanced service-oriented technology to do it? Is it better to go through a lengthy requirements process with business users before showing them a prototype of a possible solution for automating a business process? These are the questions that Sandy Kemsley, industry analyst and consultant, and Dr. Michael Rowley, CTO of Active Endpoints, address in this valuable webinar. One of Sandy’s recommendations, for example, is to use agile development techniques, build a prototype within 30 days and put an initial project in production within 90 days. Michael demonstrated how ActiveVOS is able to meet this goal because it is easy to use for architects and developers, and being based on open standards, it enables knowledge experts and the IT project team to collaborate in a single product.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Customer Demand for Broader Enterprise Adoption Drives New Capabilities

Today we are happy to announce ActiveVOS 8.0, the latest release of the company’s flagship product. Highlights of the release include support for Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) swimlanes and support for BPMN 2.0 boundary events, new data access integration capabilities, improved deployment management, and expanded task management. The combination of these new capabilities improves the ability for all stakeholders – project managers, application architects, solutions architects, and developers– to utilize ActiveVOS for designing, developing and deploying mission-critical, custom process applications even more effectively.

Learn more about the new and improved BPMS capabilities in ActiveVOS 8.0 by downloading the full release details in the .pdf below.

itfc, the London-based provider of content management services to broadcasters and content owners, is the first media company in the UK to invest in an ActiveVOS business process engine. The system will allow itfc to remotely interact with and update third-party systems, as well as its own internal technology, to help clients benefit from better workflow efficiencies.

The new solution will sit alongside the company’s current media asset management system Mediaflex, and archiving system Front Porch Digital. Together they will enable itfc to seamlessly integrate workflows across many different, and previously incompatible, broadcast systems.

Learn more by downloading the .pdf below

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.

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).

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).