CEP as sauce the alphabet soup (Part 5): BPEL
Posted by Paul Vincent
I am reminded by this article in The Register that we need to continue our alphabet soup commentary. Especially as alphabet soup is becoming a popular “dish du jour”. BPEL , from OASIS, is commonly associated with service orchestration [*1] and BPM, although under the OMG MDA it is really just another (albeit standard and therefore somewhat portable) Platform Specific Model for an XML execution language. So how does this fit with Complex Event Processing?
CEP involves multiple stages of event filtering, correlation, etc, leading to new information, data or decisions. In theory, BPEL could be extended to include temporal constructs required for event filtering, and be used as to specify behavior at runtime - it would not be the first time BPEL has been extended.
However, more usefully one could use CEP to do BAM on a BPEL-defined process. This would require the BPEL engine to make internal events aware to the CEP engine, of course, but would be useful for monitoring and control, especially if the process definitions are provided by a 3rd party or business partner.
It is interesting to note that BPEL does not seem to be as “interesting” a topic these days as the other buzzwords (SOA, BPM etc). Is this because of its position low in the Model Driven Architecture stack, and the relative importance of the model standard above it in the stack, such as BPMN? [*2]
Notes:
[*1] See TIBCO BusinessWorks service orchestration tool for an example of a BPEL version 2 engine. Note that TIBCO BusinessEvents is closely integrated with BusinessWorks, thence providing an example of events being directed to a CEP engine by a BPEL process.
[*2] See TIBCO BusinessStudio Community Edition for a “free” BPMN editor.
[*3] Note that conventional rule engine usage (such as using TIBCO BusinessEvents as a stateless decision service as a subprocess) has a much simpler relationship to BPEL. Here is a good description of this (although you can imagine the vendor products mentioned here are interchangeable with other vendors, such as for BPM: TIBCO iProcess; for BPEL: TIBCO BusinessWorks; for the BRE: TIBCO BusinessEvents Inference Edition, etc etc…).
BPM, Complex Event Processing (CEP), Standards | 25 June 2007 |
