Breaking News - Operating Systems & Middleware:
Active Endpoints Announces ActiveWebflow Professional
Active Endpoints Inc, an independent provider of services-oriented integration
solutions, announced general availability of ActiveWebflow Professional, a
comprehensive authoring environment for creating composite software
applications based on the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language)
specification. ActiveWebflow Professional, the first in a family of BPEL-based
products Active Endpoints plans to deliver, consists of two primary
components:
- ActiveWebflow Designer: a high-powered, Eclipse-based design environment
that enables information analysts to visually define process flows that are
100 percent compatible with the BPEL 1.1 specification.
- ActiveBPEL Engine: a robust, open source runtime server for executing BPEL
1.1 processes.
Leveraging the growing acceptance of Web services as the leading enterprise
integration architecture, ActiveWebflow users have an open, standards-based
solution for automating process flows across systems, business divisions, and
enterprises. ActiveWebflow Professional enables users to rapidly compose new
services-oriented processes, generate standard BPEL process definitions, and
then execute those processes using the ActiveBPEL engine (or any BPEL 1.1
compliant engine). Active Endpoints will update ActiveWebflow Professional to
support the changes currently under review within the OASIS WSBPEL Technical
Committee, the organization that is stewarding BPEL from a vendor
specification to a broadly supported industry standard. Active Endpoints is an
active member of the OASIS WSBPEL Technical Committee.
"ActiveWebflow has been a tremendous time saver for us," said Ernest
Megginson, programmer/analyst at US Unwired, Inc. "We're testing a BPEL-based
environment that will become the backbone of out IT infrastructure. We had
tried for more than a year, using various tools, to develop our initial BPEL
implementation. Then we discovered ActiveWebflow, which allowed us to turn the
corner and implement our systems quickly and cost effectively."
ActiveWebflow -- Visual, Productive, Standard.
ActiveWebflow Professional is the first in a series of BPEL related products
that Active Endpoints plans to deliver. The ActiveWebflow products will
collectively provide enterprise-class process management capabilities as part
of the ActiveIntegration Suite, a comprehensive family of services-oriented
integration solutions.
ActiveWebflow Designer is an Eclipse based environment that includes the
following key features:
- Process Visualization: intuitive, drag & drop visual interfaces that enable
users to rapidly construct process diagrams of any complexity. ActiveWebflow
Designer supports both top-down and bottom-up process modeling, providing
users with extensive flexibility at all stages of process design. In addition,
users can perform end-to-end testing of their BPEL processes using
ActiveWebflow Designer's simulation mode.
- Value-added Componentry: a multitude of high-productivity visual controls
that provide easy access to the most common BPEL related resources. For
example, ActiveWebflow's Web References Manager helps users to easily locate,
register and use existing WSDL resources. And the product's novel BPELet
feature permits diagram sections (or entire diagrams) to be quickly added to
the standard diagramming palette, enabling the rapid construction of pre-made
diagram component libraries.
- 100 percent BPEL Compliance: out-of-the-box support for any BPEL 1.1
process. ActiveWebflow users can easily render diagrams by importing existing
BPEL process definitions, and they can readily generate BPEL process
definitions from any ActiveWebflow diagram. BPEL generated by ActiveWebflow
can be executed by any BPEL 1.1 compliant engine.
The ActiveBPEL engine, which is embedded into ActiveWebflow Professional to
support deliver advanced development and testing activities, is a
commercial-grade 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 directly from
ActiveWebflow Designer's deployment wizards.
- Robust BPEL Support. The ActiveBPEL engine supports all of the BPEL 1.1
processing constructs, including complex scoping and compensation management.
- Runtime Diagnostics. ActiveWebflow Professional includes a browser-based
management console that builds upon ActiveBPEL's basic console features. In
addition, users can view processes that are executing in the ActiveBPEL engine
using ActiveWebflow Designer's diagram interfaces, providing rapid
visualization and intuitive troubleshooting.
"Services-oriented architectures are inherently more process centric than
their predecessor information models," said Daryl Plummer, group vice
president and chief fellow at Gartner Inc. "As IT organizations progress
toward full SOA deployments, Gartner believes that BPEL will be important to
organizations requiring process centricity in SOA applications."
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