Last week I’ve had a look at the new BPEL 10.1.3 Designer. That is, at a candidate-beta. It helps to have good contacts within Oracle, or is it because we’re a CAB member? Anyway, it gives us the opportunity to see what the impact of the new version will be on the applications that we have running in production. I’d like to share some first impressions with you all.
First of all, I’m very enthusiastic about this new version. It does add a lot of new functionality, but more importantly: it solves a lot of issues that we experienced in the current version. So, what’s new in BPEL Designer 10.1.3? The first thing that you’ll notice is the different layout. Different in the sense that it’s all a bit more stylized. Not that there was anything wrong with the old version imo, but the new layout is cool.But that’s not what we’ve been waiting for.
Let’s summarize the changes that i’ve discovered so far:
- Annotations: almost every object on the diagram has an annotation tab. Finally there’s a place to put your documentation into the BPEL.
- Support for Document style webservices. In the old version it was NOT possible to use webservices that made use of soap encoded arrays. Which meant that you could only use webservices that returned single rows.
- Testsuite. Every BPEL can have a testscript with it. You define both the inputs and the outputs, and use ANT to do the testing. Continuous Integration meets BPEL!
- Decision Services. Oracle Business Rules has become available in the latest version of the AS, Decision Service can be used to integrate it with BPEL. This means the BPELs will become much more flexible as you can put rules that change often into the Rules Engine. Marvellous!
- Registry integration. Instead of deploying it to a server or platform, you can now deploy into a registry. Facilitates deployment and re-use.
- Task specification. A User Task is now defined in a .task file. This makes it a lot easier to maintain the task when it changes over time. Also, there’s a lot less generated inside the BPEL, so it doesn’t get cluttered.
Unfortunately, some things haven’t changed. Building and maintaining assigns is still very cumbersome. Instead of a ‘transform-like’ screen where you can drag and drop assigns, you have to add each and every copy. Good thing about it though, is that bpelx: commands are now supported in the graphical view.
I’m sure I haven’t yet seen all the changes, but I will delve deeper into the new version in the next weeks, and I’ll post updates on the BPEL 10.1.3 version here!
April 25th, 2006 at 13:50:22
Any idea when it is possible to download a public beta release of BPEL Designer 10.1.3? Or will this only be possible this summer?
Tnx in advance.
July 7th, 2006 at 00:59:11
I read in the Oracle forums, that the next BPEL will be available as sort of a plugin or a pack for the latest Jdeveloper IDE. Is that true?
July 10th, 2006 at 12:39:15
Well, the BPEL Designer is already a plugin for Jdeveloper and still is in 10.1.3.
July 20th, 2006 at 19:50:49
Cool,
By the way, do you know if it is possible to use/install it on Debian/Ubuntu?
Thanks
August 3rd, 2006 at 11:53:38
Hi..where can i get the BPEL Designer for the 10.1.3 release.
August 3rd, 2006 at 11:58:20
I want to integrate my BPEL Process with rules engine. I heard that the integration part is available on Jdeveloper 10.1.3 but in 10.1.3 I am not able to design the BPEL process. The BPEL designer was built in with Jdeveloper 10.1.2 . Can some one help me.
August 3rd, 2006 at 15:01:36
Bpel 10.1.3 has not yet been released, you’ll have to be patient.
August 16th, 2006 at 10:03:48
[...] BPEL designer. (More info: a list of fixes, and a list of new features). We’ve been testing BPEL 10.1.3 Beta internally for some months now, you expect a paper describing [...]
August 17th, 2006 at 08:38:14
I used the Oracle eclipse BPEL designer and found it very easy and effective. What other designer softwares are available FREE on net and are equally good ?
October 6th, 2006 at 15:36:15
free is Active BPEL Designer, it is really cool, but not open source. The Eclipse BLEP plugin is not yet finished. The guys at Netbeans are also working on the BPEL designer in the Enterprise pack.
Anyone knowing other cool opensource BPEL designers?
October 6th, 2006 at 16:27:09
See my post here: http://www.it-eye.nl/weblog/2006/08/17/free-bpel-designers/
April 12th, 2007 at 08:34:48
i like this , help me
August 10th, 2007 at 17:52:50
[...] In a comment to BPEL Designer 10.1.3 Gaurav asks if there are any free BPEL designer tools. I’m aware of the following free bpel designers: [...]