jBPM BPEL and ActiveBPEL

[mherscov]

Hi All,

I am currently evaluating BPEL engines for use in a project we are building on JBoss AS. I notice that the JBossESB has support for both jBPM BPEL and ActiveBPEL, however the documentation appears to express a preference for ActiveBPEL (http://www.jboss.org/jbossesb/docs/4.3.GA/manuals/html/services/WS-BPEL.html). Given that all of our other infrastructure components are taken from the JBoss stack we are tending towards using jBPM BPEL, but the fact that the JBossESB documentation suggests we use ActiveBPEL is a bit concerning.

Does anyone know why ActiveBPEL is preferred? Does this suggest that jBPM BPEL may not be supported by JBossESB in the future?

Thanks,

Matt

[marklittle]

JBossESB does not support jBPM BPEL. What gives you that idea?

The reason we have gone with ActiveBPEL is that (at least at the time we started the work) our in-house BPEL was just the engine and had no tooling support. If you've ever used BPEL you'll understand that tooling is at least 50% of the equation with BPEL.

[mherscov]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the quick response.

I should have been a bit clearer on "support for jBPM BPEL". What I was hoping to do was configure jBPM BPEL and JBoss ESB in a single JBoss AS instance, and have the ESB route messages to and from the BPEL process as an ordinary SOAP endpoint. From what I can gather this is the extent of the ActiveBPEL integration as well - is this correct?

Regarding the tooling, I think the situation may be a bit better than it was previously. Certainly jBPM BPEL lacks a good process monitoring and debugging tool, but there are good open source BPEL editors available. I have had success using the NetBeans BPEL editor, and I understand that the Eclipse editor also works, as this is what is recommended in the jBPM BPEL documentation.

Is jBPM BPEL something you are likely to re-evaluate in the near future? Do you have many people using the ActiveBPEL integration?

Thanks,

Matt

[marklittle]

There are quite a few people/customers using the ActiveEndpoints BPEL solution in conjunction with the ESB and SOA Platform. We have no plans to re-evaluate using the jBPM BPEL at this time, but the beauty of open source is that the community can always do it themselves.

[zurchman]

Another aspect of open source is that things can change at any time, which seems to be what has happened to ActiveBPEL.

Would someone care to provide a 25-word summary on the relationship between ActiveBPEL and ActiveVOS and the webservice_bpel quickstart?

I've been struggling just to get pointed in the right direction with the ActiveEndpoints quickstart, webservice_bpel.

The quickstart requires the ActiveBPEL 3.1 Engine. Searching for this, one finds that many of the links at activebpel.org are either dead redirect to index pages at activevos.com.

Active "Designer" seems to have completely disappeared, except for this reference I was able to find in the documentation for the ActiveBPEL 5.0 release:

ActiveBPEL Community Edition includes Active Endpoints' open source ActiveBPEL Community Edition Engine and the ActiveBPEL Community Edition Designer, an Eclipse-based development environment. Community Edition allows you to learn about the OASIS Web Services Business Process Execution Language v2.0 (WS-BPEL 2.0) standard and the BPEL4People and WS-Human Task specifications.

A note in the quickstart "readme" states:

If you are running on a newer version of the ActiveBPEL Engine, you may need to redeploy these processes.

So is that the appropriate path for someone just getting started with ActiveBPEL and wants to evaluate the "Designer"? Download ActiveBPEL 5.0 and try to get the quickstart to run?

[marklittle]

ActiveEndpoints are working to update their ESB integration. Hopefully someone from there will post here soon.

[zurchman]

How about the "Designer"?

Is a Community "Designer" still available?

The 5.0 Engine documentation says the "Eclipse-based" Designer is included, but I downloaded the ActiveBPEL 5.0.2 binary release and looking through it I don't see anything that looks like it's related to Eclipse.

What am I missing?

[tfennelly]

"mherscov" wrote:
Does anyone know why ActiveBPEL is preferred? Does this suggest that jBPM BPEL may not be supported by JBossESB in the future?

Matt, ActiveBPEL is not "integrated" into JBossESB in any way. We have tested with ActiveBPEL and have a partnership with Active Endpoints, which should make integration with their product smoother etc, but there's no "physical" integration with any BPEL products, so JBossESB + jBPM BPEL is technically just as valid a combo, but we haven't actually validated that yet and as Mark says... when we were doing the ActiveBPEL work, the jBPM BPEL designer wasn't available.

"zurchman" wrote:
The 5.0 Engine documentation says the "Eclipse-based" Designer is included, but I downloaded the ActiveBPEL 5.0.2 binary release and looking through it I don't see anything that looks like it's related to Eclipse.

From my recollection... the designer used be a separate download from the Community Edition of the core Engine. I'll check into this in a bit.