In my current project we are going to need a BPEL engine besides our Mule CE implementation. Actually, we will use Mule for our stateless communication between systems and use BPEL for the stateful processes. One of the possible frameworks to use as a BPEL engine is Apache ODE. In this post I will show you how you can start a BPEL process in Apache ODE with Mule. As you will see, it is merely a combination of posts I made earlier, but I think it is nice to have the complete thing in one post.

Continue reading…

Currently, I’m evaluating BPM/BPEL engines for a client. First up: Intalio|Server. Intalio|Server is based on Apache ODE and runs on Tomcat.

Downloading and installing (read: unzipping) was easy. Starting it *seemed* easy. Just do $INTALIO_HOME/bin/startup.sh and goto http://localhost:8080/bpms-console.

Login using admin/changeit and notice the following:

“Hmmm, Intalio claims the credentials are incorrect.”

Continue reading…

Recently, Netbeans 6.8 GA was released. Great news … but unfortunately, SOA and UML support has disappeared from the release.

The SOA plugins are no longer available and at the moment there are no plans to bring back this feature set. NetBeans 6.1 and 6.5 were the last releases with full support for SOA functionality.

“Official” reaction from the Netbeans forum:

I know, it’s unfortunate that we don’t have the resources to support every feature we want to.. SOA, UML and Visual Web development are no longer supported, but Java EE 6, PHP support, and many other improvements have been made and more are on the way for next release.

Continue reading…

Just for those going through the examples of Oracle BPEL that are delivered with the SOA Suite 10.1.3.1: There is a minor issue with the supplied service ‘StockQuoteService’ which is in the ‘/samples/tools’ directory and is used in some of the supplied tutorials. If you run this service, it will always return ’0.00′, for every symbol.
This is caused by the Java code that is used in the StockQuiteService.bpel file. If you view the source of this file you will see somewehere in the file the line:
String symbol = el.getNodeValue();
This always returns ‘null’ since the nodeValue of an element is ‘null’ by definition. See the javadoc of the w3c Element object. By modifying the code to:
String symbol = el.getFirstChild().getNodeValue();
you will get the expected result for an existing symbol.

For a web-application I once created a web service proxy to communicate with a web service. In this same application we also communicated with BPEL by using the HumanWorkflow API. Why this is important to know I will explain later.
Creating the proxy was a really simple thing to do with JDeveloper 10.1.3. Just run the wizard and select the corresponding WSDL and voila. I had done this many times with JDev 10.1.2. but this time the generated webservice proxy gave compile errors! And I had done nothing exotic whatsoever!
Continue reading…

For my last project we had to get access to the HumanWorkflow Tasklist that was created and maintained by Oracle BPEL 10.1.3.1. For this purpose BPEL comes with an API that should be used. However, for the latest release there isn’t very much documentation about it. After searching the internet I ended up in this thread of the BPEL forum.
Continue reading…