Re: [wsbpel] BPELJ

Ron wrote:

Why don't we take the approach that IBM is following within their BPEL implementation: make use of the WSDL binding extensions to include other type of technology? I am talking here about WSIF. It seems to be a good approach. The BPEL compiler will be the one optimizing access to the objects.
  
I have spend a lot of time making similar points with my colleagues. I have consistently run into the objection that packaging very fine-grained data manipulation operations as Web services is a) an unnatural act for a programmer, and b) incredibly inefficient. I have found some could ways to counter the latter point (to some degree), but not the former. Does anyone have some insight into the former line of argument?

Well, I don't know how insightful it is, but here's my two cents.

I think that objection (a) is largely a product of what it means to package a Java method as a Web service today and not necessarily a reflection of obstacles intrinsic to the WSIF paradigm. It is true that a WSIF-oriented approach requires the programmer to think at least in terms of methods and classes instead of snippets, but Java programmers already think in terms of methods and classes. Refactoring data-manipulation expressions into separate methods is simple (and often useful in its own right) so I don't think that would encounter much resistance. The present gap that exists is that once the programmer writes a class exposing methods to be used in the BPEL, the programmer needs to jump through hoops to describe the Java service in the WSDL. I suspect that if the WSDL generation process was simple and reliable, many programmers would actually be more attracted to writing real Java classes instead of JSP-like embedded snippets.

wsbpel message