Essential Business Process Modeling

Summary

The main points of this chapter include the following:

• This chapter covers four important but peripheral BPM approaches: the OMG BPM metamodels, XLANG and WSFL, and BPSS.

• The OMG, best known for its CORBA standards, is an emerging BPM player, having recently published RFPs for the specification of abstract BPM models of process definition (BPDM) and process runtime interface (BPRI). More important than the RFP process and its current bids is the OMG’s idea that BPM can have a model-driven architecture. In a nutshell, MDA, when applied to BPM, helps bridge the gap between disparate process languages by specifying a common foundation—either a MOF metamodel or a UML profile—allowing BPDM-aware BPM tools to exchange particular process definitions more easily. For example, a BPMN tool can export a diagram as a BPMN XMI document, which can then be imported into a BPEL tool and transformed into a BPEL process definition.

• Microsoft’s XLANG is an XML process definition language that is interesting for two reasons: its use of the pi-calculus (examined in Chapter 3) and its influence on BPEL. BPEL began as a synthesis of XLANG and IBM’s WSFL. The XLANG contribution is its programmatic style of web services orchestration—using familiar control structures such as all, while, and sequence, surrounding action steps that model web service interactions—and its global model, which resembles BPEL’s partner link interface. XLANG is dead; Microsoft, as one of the principal BPEL authors, is now ...