Hi ODEers, I'm happy to share our paper about "rich data manipulation in BPEL" with you. It describes the first publicly available ODE extension activity and extension assign operation and incorporates the power of JavaScript/E4X into BPEL. It is still in alpha/beta but will be shipped as an example for ODE's extension points with ODE 2.0. Furthermore I'm sure that it can significantly ease the process developer's day job.
Comments are of course more than welcome :) ------------------ Facilitating rich data manipulation in BPEL using E4X (Tammo van Lessen, Jörg Nitzsche, Dimka Karastoyanova) Link: http://CEUR-WS.org/Vol-438/paper16.pdf Abstract: The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) uses XML to specify the data used within a process and realizes data flow via (globally) shared variables. Additionally, assign activities can be used to copy (parts of) variables to other variables using techniques like XPath or XSLT. Although BPEL's built-in functionality is sufficient for simple data manipulation tasks, it becomes very cumbersome when dealing with more sophisticated data models, such as arrays. ECMAScript for XML (E4X) extends JavaScript with support for XML-based data manipulation by introducing new XPath-like language features. In this paper we show how E4X can help to significantly ease data manipulation tasks and propose a BPEL extension that allows employing JavaScript/E4X for implementing them. As E4X allows defining custom functions in terms of scripts, reusability with respect to data manipulation is improved. To verify the conceptual framework we present a proof-of-concept implementation based on Apache ODE. Reference: van Lessen, T.; Nitzsche, J.; Karastoyanova, D.: Facilitating rich data manipulation in BPEL using E4X. Proc. of 1st Central-European Workshop on Services and their Composition (ZEUS 2009), Stuttgart, Germany, March 2–3, 2009, http://CEUR-WS.org/Vol-438/paper16.pdf Best regards, Tammo -- Tammo van Lessen - http://www.taval.de
