Over the years business processes have become automated to the point that the BPM community now considers the SOA language BPEL, designed for the orchestration of Web Services, as the best platform for building contemporary processes. But many processes retain some level of human activ...

The natural visualization of a business process is of boxes and arrows arranged in a tree-like formation. A large process with numerous conditional paths forms a rather expansive tree that can't fir on a computer screen or printed page. If the process has loops, these are often represe...

Choreography is the dark continent of Web services: few onlookers have traveled there, and many question whether there are any riches to be brought home from the trip. In the first place, choreographies bear such a striking resemblance to business processes that the novice might think ...

The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS, usually shortened to BPEL) is, as its name suggests, a language for the definition and execution of business processes. Though it is not the only standard process language, BPEL is the most popular, and it's beginning t...

Every aircraft can take off, fly straight, and land, but few are capable of the dazzling rolls and loops displayed at air shows. When judged on aerobatics, some airplanes are superior to others. Every BPM process language, analogously, can implement basic sequential control flow, but m...

In most software topics, the boundary between theory and practice in software is clearly demarcated: theory is for academics who seldom descend from the ivory tower, practice is for industry professionals who have long forgotten the concepts and application of theory. In concurrency, f...

Most Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) serve a definite purpose, performing a specific set of actions on behalf of client applications. The ubiquitous Bank Account bean, which supports basic account transactions such as withdrawal and deposit, appears in almost every J2EE tutorial. Students ...

Though most Java developers think of the Java Native Interface (JNI) as a framework for developing native libraries that can be called from Java, relatively few know that JNI also supports communication in the reverse direction: it provides native programs written in C with the ability...

Workflow and state machines are, as argued in my earlier article, 'State Machines and Workflow' (WLDJ, Vol. 3, issue 1), complementary implementation strategies for process-oriented applications. The state approach is a powerful abstraction for the succession of milestones found in man...

The state machine is one of the most successful ideas in the history of computing. Alan Turing built a model of computability around the concept, and in doing so became the father of computer science. Mealy, Moore, Harel, and other theorists expanded the idea, influencing engineers of ...

Developers of workflow-based applications with the Business Process Modeler (BPM) component of BEA WebLogic Integration Version 7 use a powerful, feature-rich, graphical editor, called Studio, to design workflow templates and to monitor the progress and state of runtime instances of t...