Jboss BPEL and BPMN

Question

I want to expose my business model as a webservice like there is webservice which is controlled by business structure. I am using JBoss as AS. I searched on net and found BPMN and BPEL and couldn't figure out which should be best for my idea to expose the business idea as web service. Can anybody help me out.

Answer 1

When you want to expose your process model as a WSDL Web service and the other orchestration parties are also rendered as Web services or REST services, BPEL is definitely the right and best choice.

There are a couple of open source BPEL engine available, most notably Apache ODE and its derivatives. If you plan to stick on pure BPEL (which is more technical and less business'ish than BPMN), I suggest to use Apache ODE, WSO2 BPS or JBoss Riftsaw. The latter is interesting because it AFAIK seamlessly integrates with JBoss AS.

If you prefer to use BPMN (which is then translated to BPEL), have a look at Intalio|BPMS. It comes with a BPMN designer that allows you to annotate BPMN models with technical, web service related information. There are also native BPMN (2.0) solutions like Activiti, jBPM and Drools Flow, but they don't really support Web service messaging.