e enjte qershor 10, 2004

My friend Edwin Khodabakchian left Netscape a few years ago to start Collaxa with an ex-NetDynamics exec. They develop a BPEL server. BPEL4WS , or Business Process Execution Language for Web Services, is " a notation for specifying business process behavior based on Web Services". It's been initially proposed by IBM against Microsoft's XLANG notation, and has gained some traction in the java world in the past 2 years. It is now being standardized by the OASIS

Edwin has a lot of experience in this area: while at Netscape in 1997 he had designed a now defunct workflow server called Netscape Process Manager, with the server engine initially in server side javascript (then moved to java) and the visual process designer as a Swing java application (I remember Jeremy Chone showing me how he unit tested the designer in javascript using Rhino:-).

Collaxa's server is mature now, it's been out for more than 2 years, if my memory's good. It runs on multiple app servers, and last year they released a very nice visual process desginer based on the Eclipse platform. The architecture they chose is very interesting and is a sign of the current return to rich client UIs and the dazzling array of architectural options for these: last time I looked the visual part of the modeler was done in SVG and javascript, in an embedded Eclipse Browser component, with Rhino I guess to drive the UI! I wonder if they switched to Batik now.

I've done a test drive of a beta of an old version of their server in their office last year when I came to Silicon Valley: I found it really easy to setup and use, and with many nice functionalities. One thing I liked was their JBPEL language which lets you nicely mesh BPEL processes and J2EE code.

If you're shopping for a BPEL server, I heartily recommend you to take a look at Collaxa. Here's Edwin's annoucement.

RC7 is out. On the server side, a lot of work has been done on resiliency and fail-over/crash testing. On the designer side, we upgraded to Eclipse M8 and added an Excel-like XPATH function builder. We are excited to announce that after 16 months of beta testing and preview releases, we are on target for the GA release in June!

Update: This release comes with a new BPEL Getting Started Guide. [Organic BPEL]

As a side note I recommend you Edwin's blog, Organic BPEL, which is always insighful and full of information about BPEL and SOA. To quote BEA's Adam Bosworth:

Edwin Khodabakchian (who I consistently regard as one of the most interesting people working on the web today) says he is going to try and mock this up for me. Awesome!

Which in Latin means "Rome was not built in one day".

Thanks to Tim Bray for publicizing Rome, it is indeed the "java equivalent of Mark Pilgrim’s pythonoid Universal Feed Parser. We learnt a lot about RSS in the wild from Mark's numerous articles and weblog posts (I'm subscribed to his feed since more than 2 years), and about various flavors of RSS from Ben Hammersley's most excellent Content Syndication with RSS.

It's true that Rome is still alpha, because we want the API to get a large review by the community, and we want to write serious unit tests for it. However we tested it with various flavors of feeds already and it is already used by some projects at Sun of which I'll speak later in this blog.

Also Rome is already 3 months old (we started it in march as a skunkwork), even if we waited to have something solid to release it to the community. So yes, it's younger than Mark's 2 years old Python Universal Feed Parser, the 2 years old Java based Informa RSS library, and even the 6 years old Netscape feed system (a mix of Perl and Python) that my team maintained when I was at Netcenter, but expect it to grow in stability, completeness and ease of use.

And Tim, thanks for your kind words and optimism about our abilities:-)

calendar

search

navigation

links

rss feeds

referers

Today's Page Hits: 169