Comments on: Roundtripping Revisited http://www.brsilver.com/wordpress/2007/11/28/roundtripping-revisited/ Bruce Silver's blog on business process management Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:22:38 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 By: Work Related at BruceObenour.com http://www.brsilver.com/wordpress/2007/11/28/roundtripping-revisited/comment-page-1/#comment-3247 Work Related at BruceObenour.com Sat, 08 Dec 2007 22:42:46 +0000 http://www.brsilver.com/wordpress/2007/11/28/roundtripping-revisited/#comment-3247 [...] Roundtripping Revisited [...] [...] Roundtripping Revisited [...]

]]> By: BPMS Watch » Dialog with Dumas on Roundtripping http://www.brsilver.com/wordpress/2007/11/28/roundtripping-revisited/comment-page-1/#comment-2976 BPMS Watch » Dialog with Dumas on Roundtripping Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:35:19 +0000 http://www.brsilver.com/wordpress/2007/11/28/roundtripping-revisited/#comment-2976 [...] Marlon Dumas provided a thoughtful response to my post on roundtripping.  In order to address it point by point, I am reposting Marlon’s comment here in a new thread., with my responses inserted: [...] [...] Marlon Dumas provided a thoughtful response to my post on roundtripping.  In order to address it point by point, I am reposting Marlon’s comment here in a new thread., with my responses inserted: [...]

]]> By: marlon_dumas http://www.brsilver.com/wordpress/2007/11/28/roundtripping-revisited/comment-page-1/#comment-2969 marlon_dumas Fri, 30 Nov 2007 08:23:09 +0000 http://www.brsilver.com/wordpress/2007/11/28/roundtripping-revisited/#comment-2969 Bruce, I agree with many of the points you make, but I strongly disagree with the proposition that BPEL is like an assembly language and that the readability of BPEL code generated from BPMN diagrams is unimportant. My three main counter-arguments are: 1) You won't remove the developer from the BPM lifecycle, simply because no business analyst will ever be willing to write something that resembles an XPath expression, or any other expression language. And how would you otherwise encode in an executable manner all your conditional expressions and data transformation functions which you need to run your processes and move data around? One simply needs to look at the experiences of early adopters of the "BPM on top of SOA" paradigm, such as Danske Bank which has been running a project in this space for 4-years. They have three roles: business analyst who designs high-level process model is a flowcharting notation like BPMN, the solution architect who refines these models and identifies what parts of the model will be automated and how, and finally the developer who translates them (manually) into an executable process model (see detailed discussion here: http://brahe.org/MamboPHD/index.php?option=com_docman&task=docclick&Itemid=31&bid=27&limitstart=0&limit=5) 2) If we simply don't care about the BPEL code, why would vendors not just build an engine that directly executes BPMN models? If a vendor already has a good BPEL engine, it is not extremely difficult (given the engineering resources available to them) to adapt it so that it interprets BPMN directly. And this would avoid the additional hurdle of maintaining a complex translation between BPMN and BPEL which would only make things harder to trace and to debug. If really a vendor was very keen to translate BPMN into something else, it would make much more sense to translate it into a lower-level language than BPEL, such as for example into a set of event-driven rules that can be executed in a highly scalable Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine. 3) After investing so much in BPEL, it is unlikely that vendors such as Oracle and IBM will replace it with BPMN. BPMN has to be complementary to BPEL (i.e. at a higher level of abstraction). 4) Even if we decide to use BPMN to define executable processes (as various vendors are currently pursuing), we will need two versions of BPMN: "Business BPMN" and "Executable BPMN" and these will be targeted at different types of users (e.g. business analysts versus architects/developers). The concerns of the business analyst are not the same as those of the solution architect and those of the developer. The business analyst will want to annotate his/her models with attributes capturing risks, compliance requirements, as well as simulation parameters. The solution architect and the developers are interested in extracting and moving data around, in defining application bindings, in addressing security, scalability and reliability issues, If ever you change your mind and are looking for a BPMN-to-BPEL translation which is fairly complete AND produces readable BPMN-to-BPEL code, just point your Firefox browser here: http://www.bpel4chor.org/editor/ Take a look for example at the PriceRequest BPMN model. After opening it, you can export it to BPEL with the fourth button in the menu from left to right ("Export to BPEL4Chor"). NOTE: This fully online BPMN editor only works with the Firefox browser and it takes about 10 to 15 seconds to load into your browser window. It's work in progress, If you can not get your favorite BPMN model properly exported into BPEL using this online editor, just drop an e-mail to: gero.decker@hpi.uni-potsdam.de Bruce,
I agree with many of the points you make, but I strongly disagree with the proposition that BPEL is like an assembly language and that the readability of BPEL code generated from BPMN diagrams is unimportant. My three main counter-arguments are:
1) You won’t remove the developer from the BPM lifecycle, simply because no business analyst will ever be willing to write something that resembles an XPath expression, or any other expression language. And how would you otherwise encode in an executable manner all your conditional expressions and data transformation functions which you need to run your processes and move data around? One simply needs to look at the experiences of early adopters of the “BPM on top of SOA” paradigm, such as Danske Bank which has been running a project in this space for 4-years. They have three roles: business analyst who designs high-level process model is a flowcharting notation like BPMN, the solution architect who refines these models and identifies what parts of the model will be automated and how, and finally the developer who translates them (manually) into an executable process model (see detailed discussion here: http://brahe.org/MamboPHD/inde.....p;limit=5)

2) If we simply don’t care about the BPEL code, why would vendors not just build an engine that directly executes BPMN models? If a vendor already has a good BPEL engine, it is not extremely difficult (given the engineering resources available to them) to adapt it so that it interprets BPMN directly. And this would avoid the additional hurdle of maintaining a complex translation between BPMN and BPEL which would only make things harder to trace and to debug. If really a vendor was very keen to translate BPMN into something else, it would make much more sense to translate it into a lower-level language than BPEL, such as for example into a set of event-driven rules that can be executed in a highly scalable Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine.

3) After investing so much in BPEL, it is unlikely that vendors such as Oracle and IBM will replace it with BPMN. BPMN has to be complementary to BPEL (i.e. at a higher level of abstraction).

4) Even if we decide to use BPMN to define executable processes (as various vendors are currently pursuing), we will need two versions of BPMN: “Business BPMN” and “Executable BPMN” and these will be targeted at different types of users (e.g. business analysts versus architects/developers). The concerns of the business analyst are not the same as those of the solution architect and those of the developer. The business analyst will want to annotate his/her models with attributes capturing risks, compliance requirements, as well as simulation parameters. The solution architect and the developers are interested in extracting and moving data around, in defining application bindings, in addressing security, scalability and reliability issues,

If ever you change your mind and are looking for a BPMN-to-BPEL translation which is fairly complete AND produces readable BPMN-to-BPEL code, just point your Firefox browser here:
http://www.bpel4chor.org/editor/

Take a look for example at the PriceRequest BPMN model. After opening it, you can export it to BPEL with the fourth button in the menu from left to right (“Export to BPEL4Chor”).

NOTE: This fully online BPMN editor only works with the Firefox browser and it takes about 10 to 15 seconds to load into your browser window. It’s work in progress, If you can not get your favorite BPMN model properly exported into BPEL using this online editor, just drop an e-mail to: gero.decker@hpi.uni-potsdam.de

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