In this latest InfoQ article, Tom Baeyens founder and lead of JBoss jBPM, wrote a summary of the state of Workflow & BPM standards and tools. After a detailed look at BPEL, BPMN, and other technologies such as choreography, XPDL, BPDM, jPDL, Tom takes the stance that it is time to abandon the idea that non-technical business analysts can draw production-ready software in diagrams and separate the analysis process models and executable process models. This separation is a foundation of jBPM (documented in The Process Virtual Machine) and Tom claims many similarities with the approach taken by MS's workflow foundation.
Read Process Component Models: The Next Generation In Workflow?
Going into detail on separating the execution framework from the process framework, Tom explains:
Read Process Component Models: The Next Generation In Workflow?
Going into detail on separating the execution framework from the process framework, Tom explains:
A first observation is that multiple process languages can be implemented on top of the same activity component framework. Each process language is composed of a number of activity types. For each of those activity types, the runtime behaviour can be implemented in a general programming language like e.g. Java or C#. So an executable process language just becomes a set of activity type implementations. The most important part of such an activity component is the code that implements the runtime behaviour of the process constructs. But also the XML serialization, the designer forms to configure the process construct, persistence and many other aspects can potentially be included in a process construct component.The article has already been commented on by several other BPM framework providers including Sun's middleware & standards guru Mark Hapner.