The current issue of Business Integration Journal has an interesting piece from Oracle about my favorite topic, how to keep process models (e.g. BPMN) and their BPMS implementations (e.g. BPEL) in sync, what we call the round-tripping problem. I’ve repeatedly expressed my view that if BPM 2.0 is going to deliver real benefit over what we have today, this capability is essential, but others believe just as strongly that – especially when BPEL is the implementation technology – round-tripping is a mirage, fool’s errand, or worse.
Oracle’s solution, which I don’t believe is available in the current version of Oracle BPEL Process Manager, is what the authors call a “business flow outline” with additional “metadata” that can be populated by a BPMN model using “well-defined guidelines” and fleshed out in a real BPEL design tool like Oracle BPEL Designer. Hey, “outline” — isn’t that what Edwin K was talking about a while back? I thought that was his term for modeling, but apparently it’s more in the nature of a skeleton process design created automatically from BPMN.
Unfortunately the screenshots aren’t in the bijonline version, but the print version makes it look like more than an artist’s conception. (I don’t believe this is in the current version of the product.) The outline, representing a “logical view” of the process, appears to run in Oracle BPEL Designer using a BPMN-ish notation called the Process Analysis palette. A developer can then map those shapes to BPEL activities that represent the actual implementation. To ensure the round-trip, the BPEL shapes must have guaranteed bi-directional mappings to the BPMN-ish shapes in the outline.
It’s not apparent whether Oracle plans to offer the outline as a modeling tool for business analysts or simply a way to capture BPMN models created in third party tools. If you’ve been following this thread on BPMS Watch, you’ll remember that BPMN lets you draw things that don’t map quite so easily to BPEL – or at least the kind of BPEL you’d want to edit and maintain, but there are subsets of BPMN diagrams that can be mapped automatically. If you control the BPMN tool, you can solve the problem by not letting the user draw something that can’t map easily to BPEL.
In the BIJ screenshots, the outline’s BPMN-ish shapes happen to correspond one-to-one with BPEL activities. If that’s how the thing works, it may be just a gimmick, since you’d expect a many-to-one ration of BPEL activities to BPMN shapes in a real process. But I suspect that’s just an artifact of the screenshot. Hoping to find out more…
[…] 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… […]
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