Yaron Y. Goland

The number of Web service business process (BP) specifications trying to make their way to standards status makes it difficult to tell who is doing what, especially given that many efforts are redundant. This article makes sense out of the morass by classifying Web service BP specifications into four categories. Business analyst graphs: When business analysts write the high-level business logic for a BP, they need a standard way to communicate that logic, usually graphically, to each other and to BP programmers. Message choreography: When multiple BPs want to interoperate there needs to be an agreement on not only what messages are to be sent back and forth, which is provided by WSDL, but also the order in which messages are to be sent. Platform-independent business process programming languages: When writing the code to actually execute a BP it can be very compellin... (more)

The Promise of Portable Business Processes

The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS or BPEL for short) is an XML-based programming language/execution environment intended to enable portable business process definitions for WSDL-based business processes. BPEL's goal is to make it possible to write a business process once in BPEL and then run it everywhere. As a Turing complete language BPEL can do, well, anything. Although it limits itself to features necessary for business processes this still requires an enormous number of capabilities. BPEL currently provides: Two full programming models (graph... (more)

Open Source, Java, and WebLogic

BEA believes that both open-source projects and commercial Java platform products like WebLogic are crucial to the health of the Java ecosystem. That's why WebLogic runs on top of, incorporates, contributes to, and creates open-source technologies. Even open-source projects that provide functionality similar to WebLogic tend to be best used in a different part of the Java ecosystem than the one WebLogic occupies. The Roles of Open Source To understand open source's contribution to the Java ecosystem, let's look at the many roles it plays. Open source allows the Java community to ... (more)