Intalio Developer Edition

Spent yesterday evening at the Institute of Electrical Engineers in London with Arnaud and the guys from Intalio getting the score on their release schedule.  They are doing a whistle-stop tour of briefings in major European cities, so having been over to IntalioCon in June I thought I would make the shorter journey to London to catch-up.

The most interesting development from my perspective were the intentions around Intalio Developer Edition.  This is a pure open source play which will enhance Intalio’s credentials in the OSS arena.

The stack builds up from the foundation of the Apache ODE bpm server.  Instead of Tempo, workflow utilises Singleshot as the task manager.  Singleshot is a Ruby app.  Above ODE and Singleshot is SimPEL, a scripting language for coding BPEL.

Intalio plan to develop bindings for this stack to perform with a number of languages.  The first release will liekly have support for PHP, Ruby and Java.  If I can make a distinction between enterprisey and web 2.0, I think this is going to take BPM to a new cadre of developers.

Once something firmer is released I’ll have a worthy topic of interest to take to ncl.rb.

OS MDM

I’ve blogged before on master data management.  There have been a couple of ‘recent’ developments.

The first is that MetaMatrix, acquired by RedHat in 2007, is now available as part of the JBoss middleware stack.

The second is that Sun quietly, almost too quietly, launched Mural in September, which is part of the OS Java CAPS stack for developing composite apps.

Both developments are welcome and provide users with an OS alternative to existing MDM options.

BPMN 2 XPDL

Copyright © Jason Woodruff.  Visit the original at http://jasonwoodruff.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/bpmn-2-xpdl/

The topic of process designers that support persistence of the process as XPDL is a common item on forums [here, here, here, ]. Typically the enquirer is seeking a free/open source tool.

I suspect this is because BPMN is an entry point into BPM for business users.  Probably the users do not have a BPM system at work, but they perhaps see that gaining competence in BPMN is going to be useful in the future and therefore see it as a personal development need for them.  Alternatively they might be students, again with no particular engine to design for, but with a wish to explore the technology.  Across the globe the number of users in these categories possibly exceeds the numbers of non-technical users actively designing processes for execution.

Now, if you are going to go to the trouble of learning BPMN you are likely going to draft a few processes that are meaningful and useful to your needs.  Hence, you are likely to want to persist the designs in the expectation that one day, sometime in the future, your organisation might just have an engine to which you could deploy your efforts.

Thus, we see this topic cropping up again and again on the forums.

So, to help, and to also inform my own knowledge and awareness of the market, I thought I would list all the BPMN designers that are free to download and use and provide the facility to save as XPDL.  This list will no doubt be incomplete.  If I’ve missed one then please let me know (see below).

The debate about whether XPDL actually is the best exchange format for BPMN continues, and there are competing visions for BPMN 2.0 and here, but for the business user pragmatism rules, and currently XPDL provides an available solution that is likely to be supported by the vendors into the foreseeable future.

Finally, XPDL is one thing, but what about WYDIWYE – what you draw is what you execute.

BPMN 2 XPDL

Open source:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/JWT_Proposal
They have this functionality on their road map. I don’t think it is implemented just yet.  There is also some collaboration between open source BPMN designers on the Eclipse platform.

Closed source:

http://www.activemodeler.com/AvantageFoundation Kaisha-Tec have a free ‘Home’ edition (for BPM?) that requires registration.

http://www.bizagi.com This product is based on .Net platform, so you need to download and install MS .Net Framework 2.0.  This only flies with Windows.  Website is also hugely irritating, but I guess that’s personal taste.  Free product can be downloaded here.

http://www.sungard.com/expcarnot/ Sungard Infinity Process Workbench.  Eclipse-based.  30-days limited product version available to download following registration.

http://www.tibco.com/devnet/business_studio/default.jsp Tibco Business Studio.  Can be downloaded here following registration and acceptance of license.  Eclipse-based.

http://www.itp-commerce.com/ ITP have an extension for MS Visio, but of course you need to have MS Visio installed to use this, so that doesn’t really fit into the free category.

http://bpms.intalio.com Intalio have XPDL on their roadmap.  Their Eclipse-based designer is easy to install and use, but requires registration.

Fujitsu Interstage and Global 360 Process Sketchpad may have downloadable designers, but I’ve yet to find a link!

There are others I’m sure.  For myself I’m starting to use Tibco’s product to model processes for a software service I’m working on, but I’ll not be deploying to Tibco’s engine.  I’ll switch to and support open source efforts as an ‘early adopter’ as soon as a functional product becomes available.