Java Process Servers Good Idea or Not?

Question

Just want to shout out to the community to see what peoples thoughts are on Java process servers in general.

IBM in particular tend to make a lot of noise about Websphere process server. I can see the idea behind the process servers if your working in a web service world but in practice are they really effective or are they just overkill?

BPEL is another closely linked technology that tends to get a lot of hype from IBM but I am yet to see an implementation in real life.

General thoughts welcome.

Answer 1

Some projects/companies do have complex business processes that involve many services, applications, human interactions for which using a BPM engine, its connectors, its modeling tools can be justified. But this is clearly not for everybody.

Now, to use IBM Process Server, you'll need a license, you'll need an app server to deploy it (at random, WebSphere), some (IBM) machines, maybe some expensive connectors, some licenses for the modeling tools, etc. So I'm not surprised that IBM makes noise about it (even if don't really have the same feeling), selling such a solution must be a good deal for them (not even mentioning the consulting they will add to the bill).

And BPEL, which is a standardized language to describe flows as a sequences of services consuming or producing XML messages, i.e. a generalization of BPM through XML and Web Services, is another brick allowing to promote SOA a bit further, feeding the marketing soup. So, again, there is nothing surprising in the fact that software vendors try to promote it.

Conceptually, I don't think that BPM, BPEL, etc are bad ideas. But as I said, they are not for everybody. If they don't solve anything for you, then using them would be a bad idea. But this does not necessarily invalidate them as concepts.

Answer 2

IBM has multiple offerings now in this space.

The acquisition Lombardi and heritage WPS are not merged as IBM Business Process manager. There is also a FileNet BPM that is available from IBM which are targetted towards Document centric BPM solutions.

Lombardi stack effectively uses BPMN while WPS uses BPEL as the orchecstration mechanism.

The IBM/Oracle camp had chosen the BPEL path while the others like Appian, Lombardi, Pega etc had come in from using BPMN as the execution model for the business process.

Both of them are widely used and have a meaningful reason to exist.

HTH

Manglu