2007/6/5, Assaf Arkin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
I think this is a problem of BPEL itself that's made to fit around the WSDL
SOAP-centric model, and the best way to solve it is by extending BPEL to
allow invocation on resources. I'm interested in coming up with a short spec
to extend BPEL just enough to make it REST friendly.
Anyone else interested in something like that?
This is pretty much what we have done with BPELlight (has recently
been accepted at the BPM'07). We use an extensionActivity to decouple
process logic from interface definitions. This means that we support
the specification of message exchange patterns directly, so BPELlight
is not calling operations anymore but is rather exchanging messages
with partners. Sure, this only shifts the partner binding to another
component (deployment, ESB,...) but this is actually the advantage: It
should not be that hard to define a RESTful mapping component for
GET/PUT/POST/DELETEs for such messages (maybe based on WADL, even
though I'm not sure whether REST really needs a interface description,
but thats another issue :)).
In generell is a BPEL process IMHO very RESTful. By describing
processes as resources, things like WS-Addressing and BPEL's
correlations could be obsolete.
However, here is the abstract:
In this paper we present BPELlight which decouples process logic from
interface definitions. By extending BPEL 2.0 with a WSDL-less
interaction model, BPELlight allows to specify process models
independent of Web service technology. Since its interaction model is
based on plain message exchange, it is completely independent of any
interface description language. This fosters flexibility and
reusability of process models and enables modelling platform and
component model independent business processes. The presented approach
takes a significant step towards narrowing down the gap between
business level and IT level by facilitating a more business-oriented
modelling of executable processes.
Best regards,
Tammo
--
Tammo van Lessen - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.taval.de
