BPEL Designer Project

New & Noteworthy

• June 28, 2011 – We're moving! We are planing on moving the BPEL Designer project from Technology project to the SOA top-level project. The restructuring document which outlines the details of this move can be found in the project wiki, here. This web page will be updated as we get closer to the move date.
• Mar. 10, 2011 – Updated extension activity samples. Several of you in the community have been asking about extension activities and how to more fully integrate them with the editor. The updated sample code includes extended property section tabs for the simple and structured extension activities as well as exemplary code demonstrating how to handle references to the existing BPEL model. The sample plug-ins can be found here in the Git repository
• Feb. 15, 2011 – Proposal for UI enhancements. One of our committers has been busy thinking about how to improve the BPEL Designer user experience. Read all about it here.
• Feb. 14, 2011 – CVS Commit Notification Mailing List is now available. Please visit the Eclipse mailing list subscription page to sign up.
• Sept. 17, 2010 – Good news everyone! The update site has been updated and we are now doing nightly builds. The previous build (0.4.0) is still available here.
• Sept. 10, 2010 – Next milestone plan (M5) announced A "code stabilization" plan is in the works. Check it out here. Comments and suggestions are always welcome!
• Sept. 7, 2010 – New project website is up! If you can read this and your browser hasn't crashed yet, life is good :)
• Sept. 1, 2010 – M4 release is available Check out the latest bug fixes and enhancements.

What is BPEL Designer?

The goal of the BPEL Project is to add comprehensive support to Eclipse for the definition, authoring, editing, deploying, testing and debugging of WS-BPEL 2.0 processes. WS-BPEL (Web Services Business Process Execution Language), or BPEL, is a vendor-neutral specification being developed by OASIS to specify business processes as a set of interactions between web services. By providing these tools, this project aims to build a community around support for BPEL in Eclipse.

The implementation will be extensible to third-party vendors in a number of ways. The editor will be extensible to support new activity types, property pages for extensibility of existing constructs, an extensible palette, and product-specific branding capabilities. The runtime deployment framework will be extensible so that third parties may add support for a variety of runtime engines. The model will support extensions to provide new activities or attributes, and the validator will allow for validation of these extensions.

While the key features for a 1.0 release are identified below, we welcome suggestions of additional areas in which this project could participate. Anyone who has ideas is welcome to make comments or proposals to the newsgroup and assist with the evolution of the project.

The Key Features

• Designer. A GEF-based editor that provides a graphical means to author BPEL processes.
• Model. An EMF model that represents the WS-BPEL 2.0 specification.
• Validation. A validator which operates on the EMF model and produces errors and warnings based on the specification.
• Runtime Framework. An extensible framework which will allow for deployment and execution of BPEL processes from the tools into a BPEL engine.
• Debug. A framework which will allow the user to step through the execution of a process, including support for breakpoints.