Last summer I posted on the challenge of achieving process model interchange via the BPMN 2.0 standard. In the half year since then, vendor progress toward that goal has been about zero. It seems that vendors, in particular the ones that drove the standard, don’t really care about this most fundamental user expectation of any standard. Ah well, no surprise there… But in the past couple weeks, some encouraging developments. Activiti and BonitaSoft – both are open source startups with a BPMN 2.0-based BPMS – have begun to tout BPMN 2.0 import and export. Neither one supports even the Descriptive subclass of the spec (what I call Level 1 in the training), but both vendors are full speed ahead at expanding the capabilities of their process engine. I have downloaded and installed both – an adventure unto itself – and I’ll be reporting on both in the days and weeks ahead, along with a fresh look at the latest Oracle BPM11gR1. Oracle is much further along in the engine capabilities, but so far has shown no interest in adopting the final BPMN 2.0 xsd or importing conformant .bpmn files. They had a lead of a year over IBM in terms of BPMN 2.0 support, but they have not made good use of that lever so far. Of the three, Activiti is the most limited right now – no messages or intermediate events, for example – but the part they do is based on the real BPMN 2.0 xsd. BonitaSoft is more functional all around and more “business-oriented” today than Activiti, but I would say they are both aiming at the same target. It will be interesting to see if IBM takes Lombardi Edition in a BPMN 2.0 direction; I’m not sure Phil Gilbert is a believer in its value. If not, when Activiti and BonitaSoft finish the Common Executable subclass of BPMN 2.0, the BPMS marketplace could get very interesting.
BPMN Model Interchange: Update
About the Author: Bruce Silver
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Bruce –
I’ve always felt (even when I worked at Lombardi) that interchange would be best served in the open source market – no single vendor has much impetus to do it – and invariably there would be bugs that the vendor doesn’t view as high priority (hey, the lombardi to oracle transformation exhibits some obscure bug, not sure whether lombardi isn’t exporting right or oracle isn’t importing right… think either vendor ever wants to fix that? 🙂 But in the open source world – even if the sources and targets are NOT open source, if the “interchange” (the spec) and the “transform” (the code that does the work) are open source, then (at least) developers who experience issues can actually attempt to fix them (even if those fixes are a temporary hardcode or hack).
I think Phil Gilbert’s issue with BPMN2 was that it got lost in the weeds (my interpretation based on reading his blog posts at the time). For example, every BPMN2 xml I’ve seen so far has several vendor-specific extensions (which are allowed by the spec, but likely meaningless to other tools until someone writes the adapters). As BPMN2 was getting started he was a fan and wanted it to succeed, and he drove lombardi to be one of the early adopters of a native BPMN 1.0 engine (not that it covered 100% of the spec- but there was no lossy transformation to some other format to interfere with the interpretation of your BPMN – Model preserving, to use Keith Swenson’s terminology).
I don’t have any inside knowledge of IBM’s stance on BPMN2 with respect to their products, but I, too, will be interested to see what shakes out at Impact. If they don’t make progress it might be interesting to write a BPMN2 exporter or importer. But it is a fair amount of work to do as an outsider.
[…] work he’s doing in this regard, and the light he’s shining on lack of vendor effort. Here’s his latest take on the status of things: Last summer I posted on the challenge of achieving process model interchange via the BPMN 2.0 […]
Scott,
Well non-open source vendors don’t care about standards until they suddenly do. With Oracle and IBM, once one can import and export BPMN 2.0 xml, the other will have to do it, and right away. I am actually beginning to feel encouraged on this, and plan to become more active as a facilitator of BPMN interchange. Thanks for publicizing on your blog.
–Bruce
[…] Bruce Silver has downloaded and installed BonitaSoft and has promised to report on it in the days and weeks ahead. Stay tuned! […]
Hi,
Modelio is a modeling tool that integrates UML2 and BPMN2 and that has just moved open source. (www.modelio.org)
We think of launching a BPMN import/export project, and we wonder which format to take: XPDL? BPMN2 XSD?
If we choose one, which other tool may hellp us validating the interchange?
Any advice?
Definitely go with BPMN 2.0 xsd. My new book shows you how to do the serialization.