AquaLogic BPM Suite: Sneak Preview - Gaturro Release...

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Alex Toussaint's Blog | March 20, 2008  11:59 PM | Comments (6)

We are getting very close to our second major engineering milestone, M2, and some of the cool new features are starting to become visible and usable. It is time to review each feature, make sure things are working well as planned, and polish any rough edges before the product goes out of the door.

If this is the first time you are reading about AquaLogic BPM Suite (ALBPM), we are currently shipping version 6.0, and the info you will see here is related to next release, code name GATURRO. We are also planning to have an Early Access Program (EAP) for folks interested in reviewing the product, so if you would like to participate send me a note: "alext [at] bea [dot] com". I think you will find ALBPM to be a very cool product that really solves business problems and help companies work better in their space. You may want to consider attending our Participate 2008 conference and hear directly from our customers what they think of the product. You will also be able to see live demos and talk to the whole product team. In the mean time you can learn about our next release here. :-)

For GATURRO you will find several new features and enhancements such as: usability improvements for business users, many new SOA related features like an updated integration with AquaLogic Service Bus 3.0, several new features in Studio like better support for BPMN standards, improved performance capabilities by grouping activities into a single transaction, a new Microsoft Office integration, and much more, etc.

Well, let's see some new things! If you take part on the EAP you should see the screen below when you run the installer for Studio. For this release we upgraded the Eclipse framework to version 3.3.2, which have several new capabilities. We also added out of the box plug-ins for CVS and Subversion. So you don't have to worry about downloading and installing them.

Running the installer you get up and running in less than 5 minutes. When you start Studio a good way to get moving fast is by importing one of the sample projects we include in the product. They are located at "<you machine>\bea\albpm6.1_eap\studio\samples". From there you can pick the HROnBoarding sample, there are others. Once the project is imported you can open one of the processes to start seeing new features. At the process window you will notice a more friendly interface including a right panel with different modeling constructs.

Another important modeling update in this release is our improved support for Business Process Modeling Notation or simply BPMN. If you are new to BPMN, you should spend some time reading about it. This is a very good standard that will help the BPM industry have a single unified format to represent a process visually - customer will really benefit as well from a much needed unified approach to represent their processes. A more proper definition of BPMN comes from Wikipedia: "The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standardized graphical notation for drawing business processes in a workflow".

One pretty useful feature is the ability to share assets across different projects. Right now we are calling Project Sharing, it works like your typical inheritance concept. The idea is that you could have a master project, with best practices and all he main components in the catalog, next when you create a new project you can leverage components from the master project. You work with references in development, once in production you actually get it own copies of instances so you project does not collide with other projects.

In terms of improving performance for the ALBPM Engine, we added a real cool feature that you can enable in Studio called "Greedy Execution". The main idea, summarizing, is that you could group a certain number of automatic activities to execute under one single transaction. This new feature provides improved performance for processes that do not necessarily require transactions at every step, allowing for the engine to execute at a much faster rate. This is not a good option for all processes out there, but for the ones where speed comes first it is a great feature. So for example, under very high performance requirements such as what you would find in a Telco environment you could use ALBPM to provide orchestration services close to the wire layers. You could also start to combine ALBPM with some cases of event processing like the WebLogic Event Server.

Using Greedy Execution in conjunction with our newly updated integration with  AquaLogic Service Bus 3.0, offers a great combination of service orchestration, flexibility, and speed. Folks looking for good SOA orchestration capabilities and speed  should look into this area.

Another area of improvement was in the WorkSpace. We updated the whole look and feel and made the different capabilities more intuitive. Less icons, more text, and links. Groups actions are now simple to do. The design is clean and very pleasant to use. The design team really spent a lot of time creating a more friendly experience for business users, and process participants. I think you will be very happy with the new and improve WorkSpace. In parallel, we are also updating the integration with the ALUI portal, we will support ALUI 6.5, and the integration with WLP, supporting WLP 10.2. RSS continues to be supported as well from the WorkSpace inbox.

For business users and business analysts that use Microsoft Office we have a new feature for you. We created a BPM Ribbon that can be made available inside Office 2007. This ribbon, an office component, allows you to start a process instance and interact with processes directly from Office applications such as Microsoft Word. As I mentioned earlier we continue to provide RSS feeds from the WorkSpace, which can be brought into Outlook to keep you updated on new inbox activities and processes.

This is it for now. I hope to post more sneak preview update of our next release in future blogs. Hope this was helpful and interesting for you.

Cheers,

--alex

Comments

• Update on the integration with ALSB 3.0. Basically you get everything that was possible with the ALSB 2.6, now you can also do it with 3.0. Including the Custom Transport for ALBPM/ALSB. You also get full support for BPEL. Before only XPDL processes were part of the deep integration, now all process types are supported. We have also improved the handling of services to be more robust based on customer feedback. Will probably do full blog entry on this item alone. Cheers, --alex

  Posted by: atoussai on April 2, 2008 at 4:52 PM

• Quick update on Project Sharing. So far I have been able to prove you can share Roles and Catalog Components. I had to drag and drop a process to get a copy over the receiving project. Will review this with the Engineering team for more details. --alex

  Posted by: atoussai on April 2, 2008 at 4:48 PM

• Hi Alex,
  Thanks for your attention, here I listed some useful ways JSP support could be improved:
  

  • I18n support on JSP pages: I can't use the JSTL custom tags for i18n so I pick all localized messages from a BPM Object XML attribute.
  • Integration of a JSP Editor within BPM Studio: Today I have to manually install a JSP Editor to the BPM Studio workbench. It can be simple, but today I don't have a debugger to help me with JSP development.
  • Quick JSP changes refresh: When I'm developing JSP pages for every single change I do at them I have to stop and start the engine, this is a lot of wasted time because I didn't change anything on the process flow, only a presentation file.
  • Support for custom tags / JAR files from JSP pages: We have built-in tags here in my job and we can't use them because I don't have access to the workspace classpath. The same thing is applied when I need to use custom JARs..

  
  
  Cheers.

  Posted by: moises.trovo on March 31, 2008 at 8:20 AM

• Hi Alex, All those improvements look great especially the Master project idea. Do you have any more information on it? Specically will everything be sharable including processes, organisation entities, catalogs and external references? Also do you any more detailed information on what the ALSB 3.0 integration improvement are? Many thanks, Mike.

  Posted by: mikerobins on March 26, 2008 at 7:23 AM

• Hi there,

  Was there anything in particular you were looking for in terms of the JSP support? Please share your use case with us.

  Thank you,

  --alex

  Posted by: atoussai on March 25, 2008 at 1:11 PM

• Hi there, Nice to see these changes, specially the new interface design and the Microsoft Office integration, they will help a lot. What I'm wondering now is how will the JSP support be improved. Cheers

  Posted by: moises.trovo on March 24, 2008 at 5:37 AM