Active Endpoints today announced public beta availability of ActiveWebflow, a comprehensive suite of process management products based on the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) specification. ActiveWebflow Professional, which is immediately available to Beta testers, consists of two primary components:
- ActiveWebflow Designer: a visual, Eclipse-based design environment which allows information analysts to define process flows that are 100% compatible with the BPEL 1.1 specification.
- ActiveBPEL Engine: a comprehensive, open source runtime environment for executing BPEL 1.1 processes.
Leveraging the growing acceptance of Web services as the leading enterprise integration architecture, ActiveWebflow users have an open, standards-based solution for automating process flows across systems and enterprises. ActiveWebflow Professional allows users to rapidly compose new services-oriented processes, generate standard BPEL process definitions, and then execute those processes using the ActiveBPEL engine or any BPEL 1.1 compliant engine. Active Endpoints will update ActiveWebflow Professional to support the changes currently under review within the OASIS WSBPEL Technical Committee, the organization that is stewarding BPEL from a vendor specification to a broadly supported industry standard. Active Endpoints is an active member of the OASIS WSBPEL Technical Committee.
"Services-oriented architectures are inherently more process centric than their predecessor information models," said Daryl Plummer, group vice president and chief fellow at Gartner, Inc. "As IT organizations progress toward full SOA deployments, Gartner believes that BPEL will be important to organizations requiring process centricity in SOA applications."
ActiveWebflow is the first in a series of BPEL related products that Active Endpoints plans to release during 2004. The ActiveWebflow products will collectively deliver enterprise-class process management capabilities as part of the ActiveIntegration suite, a comprehensive family of services oriented integration solutions.
ActiveWebflow Designer is an Eclipse based environment that includes the following key features:
- Process Visualization: intuitive, drag & drop visual interfaces that allow users to rapidly construct process diagrams of any complexity. ActiveWebflow Designer supports both top-down and bottom-up process modeling, providing users with flexibility at all stages of process design. In addition, users can perform comprehensive testing of their BPEL processes using ActiveWebflow Designer's simulation mode.
- Value-added Componentry: a multitude of high-productivity visual controls that provide easy access to the most common BPEL related resources. For example, ActiveWebflow's Web References Manager allows users to easily locate, register and use existing Web service resources. And the product's novel BPELet feature permits diagram sections (or entire diagrams) to be quickly added to the standard diagramming palette, allowing the rapid construction of pre-made diagram component libraries.
- Comprehensive BPEL Support: out-of-the-box support for any BPEL 1.1 processes. ActiveWebflow users can easily render diagrams by importing existing BPEL process definitions, and they can readily generate BPEL process definitions from any ActiveWebflow diagram. BPEL generated by ActiveWebflow can be executed by any BPEL 1.1 compliant engine.
The ActiveBPEL engine is a comprehensive technology for executing BPEL processes. Key features of the ActiveBPEL engine include:
- Compact Footprint. The ActiveBPEL engine is a compact Java runtime environment that can run with popular Web/application servers. BPEL 1.1 process definitions can be easily deployed to the engine directly from ActiveWebflow Designer's deployment wizards.
- Robust BPEL Support. The ActiveBPEL engine supports all of the BPEL 1.1 processing constructs, including complex scoping and compensation management.
- Advanced Capabilities. The ActiveBPEL engine goes beyond the BPEL specification to provide advanced features such as static analysis, process persistence and process versioning:
- Static analysis provides comprehensive, deployment-time validation of BPEL process definitions.
- Process persistence allows ActiveBPEL processes to be automatically resumed after an engine shutdown by maintaining all process state information.
- Process versioning permits new versions of a process to be "hot" deployed, without affecting the state of in-flight process instances.
- Server-side Diagnostics. ActiveWebflow Professional includes a browser-based management console that build upon ActiveBPEL's basic console features. In addition, users can view processes that are executing in the ActiveBPEL engine using ActiveWebflow Designer's diagram interfaces, providing rapid visualization and intuitive troubleshooting.
"ActiveWebflow's product components have undergone extensive development and internal testing," said Fred Holahan, Active Endpoints' President. "We are pleased to have reached the point where we can offer these best-of-breed BPEL products to a broad market audience."
ActiveVOS is the Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) enterprises around the globe are deploying to develop a new generation of process applications.