Doron Sherman

In the past decade "workflow" has become one of the most overloaded terms in the software industry. Almost every application is tagged as "based on workflow." While this doesn't always mean a lot, there is good reason for it; it involves recognition among software architects that the business process is the application. With the advent of Web services, workflow vendors and enterprise application integration (EAI) vendors are aligning themselves and often reinventing themselves to make full use of Web services and the inherent strengths of the asynchronous, loosely coupled software model. While Web services are powerful in and of themselves, the combination of Web services with a process-based approach is even stronger. This marriage of workflow with Web services is often termed Web services orchestration. Orchestration is a relatively new term, but it's already bein... (more)

XML Computation Trees

Every computer science undergraduate program in the world has two important foundation courses: data structures and algorithms. Open any book on these subjects and you'll see immediately that almost a third of it is devoted to graphs. Graphs are used to model a very large number of real-world problems: the traveling salesman problem, efficient routing of a package, network flows, and more - all are modeled as graphs and often solved by graph-based algorithms. A common use of a graph-based representation is that of a computation graph. Simply put, it's a graph that models a set o... (more)

Rise of the Standards-Based Integration Machines

It occurs to me that my choice of title for this guest editorial may be at least partially influenced by the recall-induced elections in California (can you see the Arnie connection?). But this column is not about politics; it's about a new, industry-standard ecosystem built around XML to address today's business integration and process automation challenges. The nature of technology ecosystems is that they are created piecemeal, usually from the bottom up. Following this model, XML initially provided a common syntax for capturing and expressing data within documents. Next, XML ... (more)

Developing Web Services with WebSphere Studio

In my last article (WSDJ, Vol. 1, issue 4) I showed you how to use WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD) to develop and publish a Web service. You saw how to use the Web services wizard to wrap an existing Java method as a Web service and expose the metadata required for invoking the service. You also saw how the UDDI Explorer is used to publish your service on a public registry so others can find and use it. This month's focus is on discovering the service and building a client that invokes the Web service. You'll learn more about how WSAD hides the complexity and mechan... (more)

BPEL Unleashed

BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) makes business processes and composite Web services first-class citizens of the Java and .NET platforms, while preventing vendor lock-in. The result is a drastic reduction in the complexity, delivery time, and cost associated with implementing workflow, BPM (business process management), and related business integration projects. BPEL is a new standard for implementing business processes in an emerging service-oriented architecture world. As such, applying BPEL introduces new considerations, challenges, and pitfalls for delivering process... (more)