Posts Tagged ‘Aqualogic’

Aqualogic @OOW2008

Yesterday, I attended two sessions about former BEA Aqualogic products: Oracle BPM Suite new features, and Oracle Service Bus deep dive.

Oracle BPM (F.K.A ALBPM F.K.A Fuego)
The new 100 day release from Oracle will be called Oracle BPM Suite 10gR3. This is in accordance with the numbering schemes of the rest of the products in the Middleware stack, so that is nice. The session was fun to attend: there were three guys presenting and they had a demo. One of the things that always stands out with the BEA products, is that they pay attention to the user experience of the product. It showed in this session: they were talking about the different persona’s and scenario’s for the product.Very much to my liking!
The new release focuses on three items: making stuff easier, more collaborative and social, and more intelligent and powerful. This is approached from the point of view of the knowledge user (end user of the product), the business analyst (who designs the models) and the IT/Operations.

Knowledge worker

• Office plugin. One of the new features that make it easier for the knowledge user is a plugin for Office. This makes it possible to start a process from your office application, rather than going to the workspace, create a new process and attach some files.
• New box layout based on a usability study. The dashboard can be different, based on different roles that you define for the knowledge worker
• Integration with Webcenter Interaction with Activity streams
• Federation of process engines possible: you can have one Workspace, hooking up to different Process engines.

Business Analyst

• There is going to be one way integration from Oracle BPA suite to Oracle BPM Studio. To be honest, this is an improvement because it means that business analysts no longer need to design the process in Oracle BPM studio, they can use Oracle BPA suite for that. Oracle BPM studio is based on eclipse. That is a very cool developers tool, not a tool that business analysts will particularly like….
• Business rules can be changed @runtime, from the Process Administration Server. Versioning of the rules is part of that
• BPMN support is very much improved, not just the rendering of it.
• Improved support for XPDL 1.0 and XPDL 2.0. By the way: in Oracle 11g BPM Suite 11g the product will move away from XPDL as the native format and will use BPMN 2.0 instead.

IT/Operations

• Process level debugging
• Eclipse 3.3 support. By the way, this will be migrated to JDeveloper in 11g
• Performance optimization options per process (e.g. greedy execution or not)
• support for attachments in PAPI-WS

This release should be coming pretty soon, and looks very good to me.

Oracle Service Bus (F.K.A ALSB)
I also attended the session “Oracle Service Bus deep dive”. The most important new feature is support for JCA adapters. ALSB is a very nice service bus, and the session highlighted some of the features and terminology. The title was a little bit misleading. It was not a deep dive, more an introduction. People that already know the service bus did not get a lot out of it, I think. The presenter was fun though, and it is always good to get a summary like that as a reminder.

Overall I think that good things are happening with the products from the Aqualogic family.