Comments on: A New Approach to BPMN-BPEL Round-tripping http://www.brsilver.com/wordpress/2006/04/10/a-new-approach-to-bpmn-bpel-round-tripping/ Bruce Silver's blog on business process management Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:37:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 By: Henry http://www.brsilver.com/wordpress/2006/04/10/a-new-approach-to-bpmn-bpel-round-tripping/#comment-53 Henry Sat, 22 Apr 2006 14:33:04 +0000 http://www.brsilver.com/wordpress/2006/04/10/a-new-approach-to-bpmn-bpel-round-tripping/#comment-53 Hi, to the best of my knowledge, eClarus (a young start-up company) has implemented the first round trip engineering between BPMN and BPEL in eClarus Business Process Modeler and the product is ready to ship the product by the end of this month . http://www.eclarus.com eClarus has worked on the round trip engineering problem for the last year. The biggest technical challenge we encounter is to semantically map the BPMN flow to BPEL. BPEL is a block structured language with limited flow capability. In contrast, BPMN is a constrained, but relative free graph. Mapping BPEL to BPMN is easier than the other direction. The approach we take is through two-phase transformation with the token-based flow analysis as the first phase to partition the flow model in a set of sub-flows and then transform the sub-flow according to the patterns. We have documented the technical approach with many examples in white paper written by our CTO Yi Gao (ygao@eclarus.com) . http://www.eclarus.com/lr_mapping.html We love to hear feedback from you. The result is that eClarus BPM can always reverse engineering a BPEL model into a BPMN model but only be able to generate a valid BPEL from a BPMN model 90% of the time. Users, however, can use "Validate model" feature to discover the exceptional 10% cases. eClarus Business Process Modeler comes three flavors; community , business analysts and SOA architects. Community is free and the other two have 15 days trial licenses and can be renewed through web. They are all Eclipse-based - Community and Business analyst version RCP-based and SOA IDE-based. SOA edition can be installed at the same IDE other BPEL designer such as Oracle BPEL designer or IBM WID and can be used to visualize/document the BPEL in BPMN and/or aligning Architects and developers with business analysts. Henry Hi, to the best of my knowledge, eClarus (a young start-up company) has implemented the first round trip engineering between BPMN and BPEL in eClarus Business Process Modeler and the product is ready to ship the product by the end of this month . http://www.eclarus.com

eClarus has worked on the round trip engineering problem for the last year. The biggest technical challenge we encounter is to semantically map the BPMN flow to BPEL. BPEL is a block structured language with limited flow capability. In contrast, BPMN is a constrained, but relative free graph. Mapping BPEL to BPMN is easier than the other direction.

The approach we take is through two-phase transformation with the token-based flow analysis as the first phase to partition the flow model in a set of sub-flows and then transform the sub-flow according to the patterns. We have documented the technical approach with many examples in white paper written by our CTO Yi Gao (ygao@eclarus.com) . http://www.eclarus.com/lr_mapping.html

We love to hear feedback from you.

The result is that eClarus BPM can always reverse engineering a BPEL model into a BPMN model but only be able to generate a valid BPEL from a BPMN model 90% of the time. Users, however, can use “Validate model” feature to discover the exceptional 10% cases.

eClarus Business Process Modeler comes three flavors; community , business analysts and SOA architects. Community is free and the other two have 15 days trial licenses and can be renewed through web. They are all Eclipse-based - Community and Business analyst version RCP-based and SOA IDE-based.

SOA edition can be installed at the same IDE other BPEL designer such as Oracle BPEL designer or IBM WID and can be used to visualize/document the BPEL in BPMN and/or aligning Architects and developers with business analysts.

Henry

]]> By: IT|Redux » Why BPMN Matters http://www.brsilver.com/wordpress/2006/04/10/a-new-approach-to-bpmn-bpel-round-tripping/#comment-52 IT|Redux » Why BPMN Matters Tue, 18 Apr 2006 02:55:30 +0000 http://www.brsilver.com/wordpress/2006/04/10/a-new-approach-to-bpmn-bpel-round-tripping/#comment-52 [...] Unlike BPML, BPMN immediately received the support of industry heavyweights such as IBM, which made it much easier to establish it as a standard. Also, unlike BPML, there was no real competition for BPMN. To be fair, BPMN is not perfect yet, and version 2.0 is adding very little to version 1.0. A standard serialization format is needed (XMI is not enough, being way too low level), and the way one can go from BPMN to BPEL is not fully specified. Adding to the complexity, nobody really knows how to go from BPEL back to BPMN, for there is no single way of doing this. Such a problem is also known as BPMN-BPEL round-tripping, and my friend Bruce Silver did a good job at describing it, following a great article from John Deeb and Devesh Sharma published by Business Integration Journal. Conventions will have to be defined, and I would be willing to bet that a standard round-tripping path will be defined sometime in 2007. In the meantime, vendors that support both BPMN and BPEL will have to give it their best shot. Too bad there are so few of them working on the problem today… [...] [...] Unlike BPML, BPMN immediately received the support of industry heavyweights such as IBM, which made it much easier to establish it as a standard. Also, unlike BPML, there was no real competition for BPMN. To be fair, BPMN is not perfect yet, and version 2.0 is adding very little to version 1.0. A standard serialization format is needed (XMI is not enough, being way too low level), and the way one can go from BPMN to BPEL is not fully specified. Adding to the complexity, nobody really knows how to go from BPEL back to BPMN, for there is no single way of doing this. Such a problem is also known as BPMN-BPEL round-tripping, and my friend Bruce Silver did a good job at describing it, following a great article from John Deeb and Devesh Sharma published by Business Integration Journal. Conventions will have to be defined, and I would be willing to bet that a standard round-tripping path will be defined sometime in 2007. In the meantime, vendors that support both BPMN and BPEL will have to give it their best shot. Too bad there are so few of them working on the problem today… [...]

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