Satish,
Yes it makes sense. In fact I’m
a bit surprised how
quickly you have understood my rather confused effort at explaining my
position….
Don’t know whether to classify
it as “executable”
though. It is executable in the sense that it drives a piece of
software
who’s job it is to manage compliance to a public contract. However
it does not get executed on a conventional BPM that actually invokes
services
in the context of a sequence…
In any case, I hope the BPEL
groups will consider this use
case in your work on abstract BPELs. I will be pleased for forward my
work (when I have done it) on mapping BCF process model elements to WS
deployment
schema elements such as BPEL, WSDL & WS-Policy. The biggest gap I
see
at present is the lack of a set of WS-Policy assertions that are
focused on
defining the semantics of public collaborations. For the present I’m
just planning to borrow the BCF/BPSS semantics but put them in a
WS-Policy
syntax…
Thanks for your feedback.
Regards,
Steve Capell
Red
Wahoo Pty Ltd
+61 410
437854
If I
understand you correctly, you are expecting the public abstract BPEL to
be used
to create a "front end executable process" that performs certain
actions such as functional acknowledgement and possibly also acts as a
guard
ensuring runtime compliance with the public contract. It is perfectly
possible to contemplate creating such an executable process (almost?)
automatically from an abstract process, and I would call this use case
an
interesting refinement of my Usage Scenario 2.
Does
that make sense to you?
Satish,
I like your review and
particularly your positioning of
abstract BPEL as a description of the observable behaviour of one party
in a
multi-party collaborative process (definition scenario 2). However but
would disagree slightly with your usage scenario 2 in which you
position the
abstract BPEL as a template for implementation of an executable BPEL
and you
assert that the template would be subject to some human scrutiny before
it is
deployed as an executable BPEL.
My background is that I have
been implementing an ebXML
framework where abstract “public processes” are defined by BPSS
schema (multi-party collaboration definition) and template CPA schema
(bilateral agreements between two roles in a process). Public
process schema are generated from UN/CEFACT BCF models. Now for a
particular party to comply with the public process, an executable
private
process is needed that will connect the internal processes &
services to
the public domain. Our private processes utilize executable BPEL.
What I am trying to do now is
provide an alternative
deployment technology for the public process models. Specifically I
want
to generate Abstract BPEL, WSDL, WS-Policy schema from the same BCF
model -
that together will provide the same capability as the ebXML BPSS and
template
CPA schema. This is basically so that we can support the same
collaborative business process models on either an ebXML or a Web
Services
deployment technology.
The middleware tools in which
these schema are deployed
provide a strong separate of public process from private process.
Currently we have an ebXML message handler what is driven by CPAs that
are
delivered from a registry based service, a “Business Service
Interface” (BSI) that is driven by the BPSS schema, and a Business
Process manager that is driven by the executable BPEL (as well as the
other
obvious components of typical middleware packages).
The reason I bore you with this
is that I wanted to point
out that the BSI’s job is compliance with the public process and to
separate some of the implementation details of that from the private
process. For example, the public process may implement a particular
transaction pattern that required a request document, message
acknowledgments,
message acceptance signals, response documents, etc - each with
timeout
conditions and security / non-repudiation requirements. I want the BSI
to
just deal with all that and thereby simplify my private process
(executable
BPEL) that now just needs to handle the business request message and
create a
business response message. So I would like the abstract BPEL
(together with a set of WS-Policy Assertions) to automatically
configure my BSI
and to be separate from the executable BPEL that represents the private
process. In this case the Abstract BPEL is a self contained thing and
is
not used as a stub or template from which to generate an executable
BPEL.
Regards,
Steve Capell
Red
Wahoo Pty Ltd
+61 410
437854
My
thoughts on abstract processes are
attached. Food for discussion at tomorrow’s call.