RE: [wsbpel] does anybody look into issues for interoperability between BPEL and ebXML?

[David RR Webber - XML ebusiness <Gnosis_@compuserve.com>]

Yaron,

It's not so tough - provided you follow some simple guides.

You can indeed do a lot with WSDL and ebXML.  However,
you have to make sure you are mixing cats with cats, 
elephants with elephants, etc.   People have created
WSDL definitions for ebMS - so that already there for us.

Clearly if you are passing a BPEL script - its just simple XML,
so no issues on binary attachments et al, ebMS can
just deliver it as such.

Also - you don't need to capture the full depth of the ebMS
configuration in WSDL if you are doing simple exchanges,
treating a ebMS as a WS* PoP.   However you are really
unlikely to be doing this - the more interesting thing is where
you have a service that is acting as both an ebMS and a WS*
interface, then content can flow thru its queue out to either
client, and a BPEL process could have ebMS action steps.

Also - the other interesting synergy is using BPSS and BPEL
in tandem.   Notice BPSS is based on binary-collaboration
model - so it spans the graph and structure flows - and allows
the business flows to be expressed non-procedurally.

Therefore - when you need components that are procedurally
complex - you can turn to the execution engine to provide that.

Here's a scenario.

Using BPSS and BPEL in tandem.  

You use BPSS to describe the overall business processes 
in business terms, then you use BPEL to describe components 
in the BPSS.  And conversely, pre-defined BPEL components 
can be included into BPSS diagrams as nodes.

Example:  I describe my part ordering process in BPSS, then I 
use BPEL to describe the part_availablity_check - internally,
because that is a complex process - involving 4 warehouses,
returns department and back-ordering and delivery / product
completion, and the internal online ordering system,
to establish exactly what is on-hand quantity.   So - on my BPSS - 
I can put a Step - "verify_part_availability_check", with parameters
method=BPEL, location="URL:bpel-somewhere.bpel", partno="1234"

I would recommend we add a Use Case to the use cases so
we can develop this formally with a worked example.

Thanks, DW.
===========================================================
Message text written by "Yaron Y. Goland"
>
does anybody look into issues for interoperability between BPEL and
ebXML?Since BPEL has adopted WSDL as its binding framework the most obvious
way to communicate with ebXML would be to invent a WSDL binding for ebXML.
But in practice I suspect that wouldn't work as ebXML has a lot of
signaling
and other behavior that would be a real nightmare to capture in WSDL 1.1.
In
fact some ebXML behavior (such as the ability to have more than one type of
success response) can't be described by WSDL and WSDL doesn't currently
provide any standard for how to validate attachments which ebXML uses to
move around application messages.

I suspect if we want to have a binding to ebXML we would need either to
create a profile of BPEL that could bind to BPSS or hack the BPEL
primitives
to better handle some of the more unique ebXML messaging handling aspects
along with a heavily modified version of WSDL but that would be a massive
amount of work that one can safely say is out of scope for this TC.
<