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.

BPMN

Bruce Silver has recently posted a popular piece on BPMN that reminded me of some comments made by Assaf Arkin at the Intalio User Conference way back in June.

Is BPMN a graphical BPEL designer?  Yes, with a tool like Intalio, I think that is true.  But working with BPEL (for a business functional guy like me) is akin to putting hot metal under my fingernails.  It’s not that I couldn’t learn to write BPEL, it’s just that I work to live not live to work …

I’ve always been impressed with the simplicity of the Ruby process executable used in openWFEru (demonstrating Ruby’s flexibility).

Simple BPEL (Simpel) is being developed/integrated by the Intalio team.  This is likely to provide a usable alternative to graphical BPEL designers.  There is a suggestion that BPMN diagrams could be generated from Simpel.  I don’t know, but I’m guessing it’ll be possible to write Simpel directly in Ruby …

Maybe Simpel will gain the popularity of BPMN.  The opportunity is that I can use a simple editor to write Simpel processes without having to use a BPMN designer.  This, I guess, avoids the translation problem from diagram to BPEL?

Anyway, I’m down in London in a couple of weeks to get up-to-speed with Intalio 6.0.  Interested in Simpel and REST support, as usual.