Latest News from Michael Havey

The Flesh and Bone of SOA

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 17:45:00 EDT

Over the years business processes have become automated to the point that the BPM community now considers the SOA language BPEL, designed for the orchestration of Web Services, as the best platform for building contemporary processes. But many processes retain some level of human activity, and BPEL's support for human interaction is problematic. Most attempts to integrate human workflow with BPEL, such as BPEL4People (as well as proprietary task subsystems offered by the major BPM vendors), try to fit human activities into BPEL's execution model. Human tasks are simply special steps in the larger process.

Chopping Down Trees: How To Build Flatter BPEL Processes?

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 09:30:00 EDT

The natural visualization of a business process is of boxes and arrows arranged in a tree-like formation. A large process with numerous conditional paths forms a rather expansive tree that can't fir on a computer screen or printed page. If the process has loops, these are often represented as arrows pointing back to earlier boxes, resulting in an untidy graph structure. Although BPEL isn't a visual process language, its XML representation can form code trees that are no less cumbersome. A receive inside a sequence inside a flow inside a switch inside a pick, even if properly indented, can make a coder see double.

Modeling Web Services Choreography with New Eclipse Tool

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 21:30:00 EST

Choreography is the dark continent of Web services: few onlookers have traveled there, and many question whether there are any riches to be brought home from the trip. In the first place, choreographies bear such a striking resemblance to business processes that the novice might think that the two types of artifacts are indistinguishable.

BPEL SOA and Web Services For Java

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 15:30:00 EST

The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS, usually shortened to BPEL) is, as its name suggests, a language for the definition and execution of business processes. Though it is not the only standard process language, BPEL is the most popular, and it's beginning to saturate the process space.

Rating WebLogic Integration 8.1 on Process Patterns

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 15:15:00 EDT

Every aircraft can take off, fly straight, and land, but few are capable of the dazzling rolls and loops displayed at air shows. When judged on aerobatics, some airplanes are superior to others. Every BPM process language, analogously, can implement basic sequential control flow, but most languages struggle to support the most advanced splits, joins, loops, and synchronizations.

BPM Theory for Laymen

Wed, 25 May 2005 16:00:00 EDT

In most software topics, the boundary between theory and practice in software is clearly demarcated: theory is for academics who seldom descend from the ivory tower, practice is for industry professionals who have long forgotten the concepts and application of theory. In concurrency, for example, most developers either know or have programmed semaphores, but few remember the conceptual underpinnings devised by Dijkstra.

JavaCaller: The Last Session Bean

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST

Most Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) serve a definite purpose, performing a specific set of actions on behalf of client applications. The ubiquitous Bank Account bean, which supports basic account transactions such as withdrawal and deposit, appears in almost every J2EE tutorial. Students are persuaded that real-life EJBs, though more advanced, are as practical and particular as those developed in the classroom.

Calling Java From C

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 00:00:00 EDT

Though most Java developers think of the Java Native Interface (JNI) as a framework for developing native libraries that can be called from Java, relatively few know that JNI also supports communication in the reverse direction: it provides native programs written in C with the ability to call Java objects. However, the coding is thorny; logic that can be coded readily in a few lines of Java requires several times more lines of C, thanks to JNI's granular programming model and peculiar approaches to exception handling and garbage collection.

E-State: An Enterprise State Machine

Thu, 26 Feb 2004 00:00:00 EST

Workflow and state machines are, as argued in my earlier article, 'State Machines and Workflow' (WLDJ, Vol. 3, issue 1), complementary implementation strategies for process-oriented applications. The state approach is a powerful abstraction for the succession of milestones found in many business processes.

State Machines and Workflow

Fri, 09 Jan 2004 00:00:00 EST

The state machine is one of the most successful ideas in the history of computing. Alan Turing built a model of computability around the concept, and in doing so became the father of computer science. Mealy, Moore, Harel, and other theorists expanded the idea, influencing engineers of digital logic, real-time, and embedded systems whose designs are peppered with state machines and diagrams.

BPM Offline Viewer

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 00:00:00 EST

Developers of workflow-based applications with the Business Process Modeler (BPM) component of BEA WebLogic Integration Version 7 use a powerful, feature-rich, graphical editor, called Studio, to design workflow templates and to monitor the progress and state of runtime instances of templates.