Friday, May 8, 2009

Process Manager Interoperability - Wf-XML

Scott Francis sent me a snippet from a recent Keith Swenson blog posting on Wf-XML...

I've been looking for a standard like this... Process Folks have been pretty focused on Process Definitions that can be executed on any Process Manager (Process Portability), but in my day-to-day it seems a lot more important to insure that Process Managers can operate with each other...

Specifically, I want to be able to incorporate a Process that is running on one Process Manager as a Sub-Process of a Process that is running on another Process Manager. I want to be able to start the Process, Monitor the Process, and get Information back from the Process when it completes.

Much as we might like a world in which there is only one Process Manager, this just isn't going to happen. Consider the Java app server world... Despite corporate attempts to mandate the use of only one Java app server you still find a mixed bag. Once a WebApplication is developed and deployed on one flavor of Java app server it's seldom migrated to another. It's just not worth the expense or the hassle - even though migration might be relatively straight-forward.

In the Process World we should be able to take full advantage of previously deployed Process Applications regardless of their BPM platform. If an application has been developed with an embedded jBPM Process Manager I should be able to incorporate it in my Lombardi solution. If my Lombardi implemented Process can be used by a wider Pega implemented Process, then that should work too.

Wf-XML is an attempt to make that happen... I haven't had time to delve into the details, but the concept is right on the mark.

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