[OASIS Issue Tracker] (TOSCA-318) Lack of BPMN/BPEL support

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    [ https://issues.oasis-open.org/browse/TOSCA-318?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=65363#comment-65363 ] 

Huabing Zhao commented on TOSCA-318:
------------------------------------

A comment from a TOSCA open source project leader and scholar
发件人: tosca-comment@lists.oasis-open.org [mailto:tosca-comment@lists.oasis-open.org] 代表 Oliver Kopp
发送时间: 2017年3月2日 16:29
收件人: tosca-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
主题: [tosca-comment] Workflows in TOSCA

Dear OASIS TC,

I read the PRD 02 of Version 1.1 and read about the simple workflow language.

I have a background of several years in the area of workflow management. I was at the IAAS, which build a workflow-engine for BPEL (research prototype) and I know one main contributor of Apache ODE pretty well and also the founders of Camunda, which build a very good BPMN engine.

We also use BPEL and BPMN in context of TOSCA 1.0 and it works.

Seeing the workflow language in the specification, I think, the language is well-suited for short running tasks. But what about long-running processes? Such as monitoring the application. What about human tasks? What if I need an Oracle license? How can I do that with the proposed language? What about complex fault handling? What about reversing actions (compensation!)? This is all possible with BPEL and BPMN engines.

We also showed than one can combine declarative and imperative provisioning using BPEL:
Breitenbücher, Uwe et al.: Combining Declarative and Imperative Cloud Application Provisioning based on TOSCA. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E), 2014.
http://www.iaas.uni-stuttgart.de/RUS-data/INPROC-2014-21%20-%20Combining%20Declarative%20and%20Imperative%20Cloud%20Application%20Provisioning%20based%20on%20TOSCA.pdf

We also have REST extensions for BPEL and also a simplified syntax for BPEL (http://bpelscript.org/).


TOSCA aims for portability. It has been shown that BPEL and BPMN are portable. Not all construcuts, but the most important ones. An overview is given here: https://peace-project.github.io/


In TOSCA 1.0, this was acknowledged. One could add arbitrary management plans. Winery (http://eclipse.org/winery/) also supports that. We also offer an open-source BPMN Modeler with direct support of TOSCA. Source: https://github.com/winery/BPMN4TOSCAModeler. The result is converted to BPEL processes, which have been successfully deployed on the WSO2 BPS, but can also deployed on other BPEL engines.


All in all, I would like to ask the TC if it was possible to bring back the support of established workflow languages and not restrict the implementors to one language.

Greetings from Stuttgart,

Oliver

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> Lack of BPMN/BPEL support
> -------------------------
>
>                 Key: TOSCA-318
>                 URL: https://issues.oasis-open.org/browse/TOSCA-318
>             Project: OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) TC
>          Issue Type: Bug
>          Components: Profile-YAML
>    Affects Versions: V1.1_CSD01, V1.1_CSD02
>            Reporter: Huabing Zhao
>            Assignee: Huabing Zhao
>
> I notice that the draft of  "TOSCA Simple Profile in YAML Version 1.1"  is trying to define a new workflow DSL inside TOSCA instead of using existing standards such as BPMN/BPEL which is recommended in the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications Version 1.0[1]. 
> Below is the description of plan(workflow) in the V1.0 Spec:
> --------------------------------------------------------
> planLanguage: This attribute denotes the process modeling language (or metamodel) used to specify the plan. For example, “http://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/20100524/MODEL”; would specify that BPMN 2.0 has been used to model the plan.
> TOSCA does not specify a separate metamodel for defining plans. Instead, it is assumed that a process modelling language (a.k.a. metamodel) like BPEL [BPEL 2.0] or BPMN [BPMN 2.0] is used to define plans. The specification favours the use of BPMN for modelling plans.
> --------------------------------------------------------
> Since many open source and property orchestration implementation have already adopted TOSCA and used the BPMN/BPEL as the process modelling language, this incompatible change may force them to refactor their implementation to adapt to the new Spec, wich will definitely cost a lot of time and work. As far as I know, OPEN-O[2], Open-TOSCA[3] and some of the internal projects of ZTE will encounter this problem.
> [1] http://docs.oasis-open.org/tosca/TOSCA/v1.0/TOSCA-v1.0.html
> [2]http://www.open-o.org
> [3]http://www.iaas.uni-stuttgart.de/OpenTOSCA/



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