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Active Endpoints Takes Visual Orchestration Public


BPEL4People adds human activities to workflows

By David Worthington
March 6, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Active Endpoints believes that it has cracked the code to bring Web services into mass deployment for line of business applications. Like Soylent Green, but in a good way, the secret to the cipher: people.

The centerpiece of ActiveVOS is visual service orchestration development environment that recognizes and works with human-focused tasks. It works in conjunction with debugging, deployment and testing facilities to help project teams design and maintain composite applications.

ActiveVOS 5 became generally available yesterday. Prior to this release, only Active Endpoint’s OEM customers had access to the service orchestration tools.

To enable visual workflow creation, Active Endpoints chose to implement the nascent BPEL4People specification and the complementary WS-Human Task explained Chris Keller, vice president of product development.

BPEL is a Web service-based business process modeling language that orchestrates interactions among different services. BPEL4People is a BPEL extension that addresses human interactions, and WS-Human Task provides the definition of human tasks.

“Many vendors have proprietary [workflow] engines,” said Sandra Rogers, IDC’s program director for SOA, Web Services and integration. “They [Active Endpoints] are presenting a standards-based environment that does not have infrastructure dependencies.”

Its other workflow features include the ability to create logical groups of people to protect applications from role changes, and a “task inbox” for end users to access process works in-progress.

Rogers observed that the ActiveVOS service orchestration interface follows the same metaphor as other BPM tooling and orchestration solutions. However, she noted that its packaging of life-cycle elements was “interesting.” She observed, “The developer can deal with what they need to without swapping back and forth into other systems.”

Beyond the Workflow
Testing is another one of its functions, and ActiveVOS can simulate orchestrations in offline unit tests.

BUnit (BPEL unit) tests are created by recording simulations in the ActiveVOS designer and can be combined into collections of simulations to build test suites. The BUnit function has the ability to insert sample data into applications.

The same process is used to debug production orchestrations, and remote debugging provides the ability to alter or inspect message input and output, change endpoint references, and people assignments in the application.

Pages 1 2 


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