Combining jBPM and BPEL

[kdeboer]

We are intending to use BPM on top of a (partly existing) SOA Architecture.
The BPEL standard has no provisioning for Workflow. A lot of BPEL products extend the standard to incorporate this.
I think jBPM is a far better solution for this. But for service orchestration BPEL is a good option (although i am not a fan myself of XML scripting languages).
JBoss BPEL internally makes use of the same process database (so i have understood).
So an excellent combination would be to have jBPM manage the overall business process including the worklow tasks. But it would be nice to have a bpel engine do the webservice orchestration stuff. This BPEL process should be modelled as a sub process (a process state on the highest level).
It would be deployed in the same jBPM process db and offer good opportunities for Business Activity Monitoring.
Is such a scenario possible with JBoss BPEL and jBPM?

[estaub]

Karl,

I'm curious... do you really need BPEL, or just a convenient node type for calling out Web Services from JBPM?

You could certainly start a BPEL process within a JBPM node now... what more would you need? (I'm not accusing you of whining - I'm just asking! ;-)

When I read your first paragraph, I expected you to want to run JBPM automation within a BPEL orchestration context, not the opposite.

I suspect you have user tasks (tasks performed by humans) - correct?

Thanks for your provocative post.
-Ed Staub (just another user)

[kdeboer]

No i am definitely not whining :-)
My customer is in the process of selecting a BPEL tool and i want to push a JBoss Open Source solution. I love the possibilities JBPM has. It is more powerful than BPEL and more flexible.
So i think it would be a big plus to combine them. And i do want to call a BPEL process from within a jBPM process and not the other way. Of course a BPEL process is just another WebService and could be called from within a jBPM action. But it would be better if the BPEL process would start automatically (or as a result of moving the process token) as a subprocess within the jBPM outer process. And when it completes the outer process would transparantly take over / continue. I see less use cases for the scenario you are describing.
A big disadvantage of BPEL is that everything you call has to be a webservice. New standards like BPELJ are a sign of this. So orchestrating webservices with BPEL, the remainder under controlof JBPM sharing the same process db.

[kdeboer]

And i forgot to mention that we indeed have many tasks for users. The webservice orchestration part is in our case less important. So if web service orchestration is more important than managing heman tasks it would be a good idea to do the oppoisite (intgrate jBMP human tasks in a BPEL process)

When i talk about BPM i really talk about Busines Process management, optimizing business processes, that is why the integrated view the jBPM DB could possibly offer a big plus).