Hi,

I am working on a project, which require support for right process modeling language. I want to share my experience with you and looking for feedback.

Currently, there are so many standards to define business processes and it is very hard to choose. Some of the important standards are as follows:

1. BPML - Business process modeling language from BPMI.org
2. WSFL - Web services flow language from IBM
3. WSCI - Web services Choreography Interface from BEA, Intalio, SAP, Sun
4. BPSS - From OASIS
5. WSCL - web services conversation language from HP
6. WSCM - web services component model from OASIS
7. XLang - from Microsoft

Based on business process management market leaders (BEA, Microsoft, IBM, Tibco, WebMethods, Versata, SeeBeyond, Sun, and Vitria) commitment to different standards, I short listed BPML + WSCI and WSFL.

To finalize on the standard, I compared standards on following criteria:

1. Support for web services standards
- Both supports

2. Support for transaction and exception management
- BPML is better than WSFL in this area.

3. New news from different companies about supporting these standards
- It is noticed that after WSCI standard release, many companies did press releases mentioning their support for BPML. Many companies claimed that they would support WSFL and BPML both. But none of them said they would only support WSFL.

4. Public + private process support

-BPML + WSCI and WSFL both supports public and private process support.

5. Vendor neutral
-BPML is by a standard organization of 130 members. WSFL is by IBM. WSFL will be submitted to W3C but who knows when W3C will come up the new modified standard.


Based on these criteria, I selected BPML.

Thanks in advance for your comments and suggestion.

regards
deepak mittal
deepak_mittal at hotmail dot com

Some enlighting notes on the proper use of XML for orchestrating Web services:

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/pl/xml/02/07/08/020708plweborch.xml

Realizing the difference between public interface (choreography) and private implementation (orchestration).

Doron.

Hi,

You might want to extend your decision process to include the quality of the tool that is used to generate the process definition: indeed, the XML representation of the private implementation gets very quickly very complex specially as you start dealing with real world application.

The side effect is that those XML implementation are not human readable and developers and business analysts are constraint to use the visual modeling tool...You want to make sure that that tool has the flexibility you need because when you hit the wall there are no work arounds.

You should expect to see a lot of innovation in the next generation of BPM languages (private implementation) to try to combine visual modeling with more flexible scripting capabilities: Microsoft X# will be one of them.

On the public interface from, things will consolidate soon: a joint proposal from IBM and microsoft will put a lot of pressure on all other proposals including WSCI.

Good luck with your project,
Edwin
http://www.collaxa.com

Hi Edwin,

We want to create our own applet based process designer. Microsoft X# scripting usage in applet will be difficult. We want our process designer available over the internet with no client install.

Timing is everything. If IBM and Microsoft proposal is coming after 6 months then it is really not good for us.

thanks
deepak mittal

Deepak,

It seems that you would not have to wait much longer: BPEL4WS, WF-Transaction and WF-Coordination should be able to address your requirements.

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/08/08/020808hnwstrio.xml

It seems to me that you are looking to build a wizard based process editor. In which case you could have a 2 layer solution: Layer 1 would be the XML model of your wizard which you control entirely and layer 2 would be a generic X# or BPEL4WS script that reads the configuration of layer 1 and customize its behavior.

Good luck,

Edwin
http://www.collaxa.com

I think I need to find the answers of following questions:

How BPEL4WS is better than BPML?
Which will dominate in future and why?
Why IBM, and MS not settling for BPML?
Is BPML also going to support different web services related standards like WS-Security, WS-coordination etc?
Why BEA after developing WSCI and part of BPML going for BPEL4WS?

regards
deepak mittal

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