Re: [stp-dev] Re: [Open letter to STP regarding BPEL and other verticals

["Alex Boisvert" <boisvert@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kevin McGuire wrote:

3) >>I will leave it to the appropriate parties to comment on BPMN.
This is actually the one that has me the most concerned wrt. overlap and direction.

Hi Kevin,

I do share your concern about overlap and would certain like to discuss direction of the BPEL/BPMN Designers.  When Intalio was approached late in 2004 related to the STP project, it seemed a good fit to host the BPMN Designer effort.  If it appears to you that there's a better place for the BPMN project, I would be happy to revisit this organization with you and the STP project members.

The goals of BPMN are to provide organizations with better communication means through standard business process diagrams, and to ensure that these diagrams embody sufficient information to define and ultimately execute as BPEL processes.

As such, I do think both BPEL and BPMN Designer will end up with similar underlying models, although some differences in semantics can lead to complications and divergent models for levels above BPEL.  Whereas the BPEL designer attempts to give a high-fidelity representation of BPEL execution concepts, BPMN starts with similar but different visual concepts that do not map 1-to-1 with BPEL elements.  There's been a lot of recent (blog) discussions about BPEL and BPMN metamodels and the possibility of having a common MOF-based metamodel.   The OMG is also trying to realign BPMN within the UML 2.0 metamodel so my guess is BPMN may all of a sudden inherent a significant formal metamodel from this effort.

As for our current effort, we started with decoupled approach consisting of a GEF-based UI layer and a corresponding EMF-based model drawn from the most recent BPMN specification.  There are real challenges in reconciling the current BPMN + BPEL specs.  When in doubt, we currently defer to BPEL since this is our first and most important execution target today, and provides a more formal and stable foundation.   This work helps provide feedback to the BPMN spec team in terms of the mapping to BPEL.

I hope this helps your understanding of our direction and current work.  I would be happy to discuss with you ways to work together so we can better leverage each project's work and align directions.

regards,
alex