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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News - Operating Systems & Middleware:
Active Endpoints Announces Open Source BPEL Initiative
Active Endpoints Inc, an independent provider of services-oriented integration
solutions, announced the formation of ActiveBPEL LLC, an open source
organization intended to promote industry interest, education and development
around the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) standard. Active
Endpoints has licensed the entire code base of its ActiveBPEL engine to
ActiveBPEL LLC, making it the first commercial-grade BPEL technology available
to the open source community. The ActiveBPEL engine is a robust runtime
environment for executing processes based on the BPEL4WS 1.1 specification,
and is a pivotal technology in Active Endpoints' forthcoming ActiveWebflow
product family.
The primary objective of ActiveBPEL, LLC is to accelerate the use of BPEL
across the extended IT community. Specific organization goals include:
- Providing users and organizations with free software for experimentation
and prototyping.
- Establishing an active community of BPEL enthusiasts.
- Supporting horizontal and vertical technology innovation around BPEL.
- Allowing systems integrators to develop BPEL methodologies and best
practices.
- Encouraging other open source projects to use BPEL in their technologies.
- Improving the quality and richness of the ActiveBPEL code base through
community contributions.
"IT organizations, ISVs and systems integrators all benefit from access to
high quality, free implementations of advanced technologies," said Dan
Sholler, vice president and director of Technology Research Services at META
Group, a leading provider of IT research, advisory services, and strategic
consulting. "Increasing acceptance of open source technologies explains why
they are becoming a popular foundation for learning and experimentation within
the IT community."
ActiveBPEL Engine -- Commercial-Grade Open Source.
The ActiveBPEL engine is a comprehensive technology for executing BPEL
processes. Key features of the ActiveBPEL engine include:
- Compact Footprint. The ActiveBPEL engine is a compact Java runtime
environment that can run with popular Web/application servers. BPEL 1.1
process definitions can be easily deployed to the engine via file-based
deployment descriptors.
- Robust BPEL Support. The ActiveBPEL engine supports all of the BPEL 1.1
processing constructs, including complex scoping and compensation management.
The engine will be continually upgraded to support future versions of the BPEL
standard as those versions are released from the OASIS standards organization.
- Advanced Capabilities. The ActiveBPEL engine goes beyond the BPEL
specification to provide advanced features such as static analysis, process
persistence and process versioning:
- Static analysis provides comprehensive, deployment-time validation
of BPEL process definitions.
- Process persistence allows ActiveBPEL processes to be automatically
resumed after an engine shutdown by maintaining all process state information.
- Process versioning permits new versions of a process to be "hot"
deployed, without affecting the state of in-flight process instances.
- Extensibility. In addition to the ActiveBPEL engine's browser-based
management console, developers can also integrate their applications with the
engine through a robust collection of event and administrative APIs. These
APIs are conveniently exposed via Web services to facilitate integration.
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