The current implementation of Open ESB provides the developer with the ability to generate pdf based reports for their BPEL processes. By its nature this functionality is restricted in what it can provided and often does not meet the projects requirements simply taking the documentation added to the the various BPEL activities and writing it out to a pdf whilst also generating a graphical representation of the BPEL that frequently does not fit into the document correctly.

Having discussed this with a some of our pre-sales representatives I decided to see what I could achieve and build a flexible template based alternative. Much of the code used within the generation process is based on the previous work I did generating SVG from BPEL but enhanced to improve performance and flexibility.

This first blog entry describes the command-line interface to generating the the BPEL Documentation whilst a subsequent entry will describe the NetBeans Plug-in I have built to proved the additional functional at a single click.
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