Favourite Things

Human workflow interaction, JDeveloper process designer, Sensor support and excellent error correction facilities, these are a few of my favourite things in the upcoming Oracle BPEL release, currently in Beta 3.  The latest Oracle BPEL Process Manager (Oracle BPM) will be released shortly and it is a major improvement over what I thought was already a great product.  Below are just some of my personal favourites.

Human Workflow Interaction

The current production version of Oracle BPM has a basic Task Manager, it is functional but not very exciting and little tricky to use.  The upcoming release has a powerful user workflow component that comes with pre-built templates for flows such as multi-level aprovals, voting, escalation and much much more.  A customer I have been working with was immensely impressed by how much he could with it straight out of the box.  It even interfaces with ID Management systems to figure out how to escalate to a manager, or another person in the same group.  Full marks to the developers for this one.

JDeveloper Process Designer

Ashamed of your old IDE, longing for all the new features that the latest and sexiest IDEs had.  I used to be just like you a few years ago when I only used JDeveloper because I worked for Oracle.  Over the last 2 or 3 years JDeveloper has leap frogged the competition so that now a common customer comment is "I didn't realise how powerful it was".  I now love JDeveloper and would use it as my Java IDE even if I didn't work for Oracle.  So imagine my disappointment when I was unable to use JDeveloper to develop my BPEL processes.  Well I am disappointed no more, the BPEL Process Designer will now be available in Eclipse and JDeveloper going forward - my prayers have been answered.

Sensor Support

An exciting product for me to preview to customers has been the upcoming Oracle Business Activity Monitoring tool.  The upcoming BPEL release now adds support for placing sensors directly into your BPEL process allowing you to create events in the BAM tool.  This will enable us to create Business Processes that provide in-flight instrumentation and allow the business to flag up out of tolerance behaviour in the BAM tool.  A great start for the BAM delivery.

Error Correction Facilities

Fixing problems in your BPEL code has often been tricky and required a lot of knowledge about BPEL.  Well the latest build of the BPEL Process Designer includes not only flagging of errors, but with the error description is a short suggestion of what might be done to correct it.  Whilst running a workshop with a customer we found this invaluable help, and the customer was able to fix most errors himself by reading the suggestions.  Good attention to detail!

Is There a Downside

Only downside I have discovered so far is that all this isn't production quite yet.  But it soon will be in the next few weeks.  In the meantime you can download the Beta-3 from the Oracle technology Network.  Try it and let me know if I am smoking something or is the latest release another big step forward for the Oracle BEL Pprocess Manager.

Useful Links

Oracle BPEL Process Manager Page on OTN

I didn't even mention the new file adapter -
check out this link for an example of using it.