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Posted by editor on February 14, 2006 at 11:05 AM EST

The big picture behind BPEL

Today's Feature Article offers a somewhat different approach, in that it doesn't involve much code. In fact, while it introduces Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), you won't find a short "Hello World" style example. In this case, the author thought it was most important to focus on the ideas and motivations behind BPEL, not in walking through a simple example of its syntax.

In Separation of Concerns and BPEL, Stephen B. Morris lays out his approach as follows:

In this article, I'll review the idea and merits of separating software features from business processes in the context of BPEL. Along the way, we'll see how this leads neatly to the need for highly generic software.

This high-level, code-free overview is sort of an experiment. I'm interested to know what you think -- is a "big picture" article valuable to you, or does it come off as "marketing" if it doesn't get down to the code level? Post a comment here or on the article with your thoughts. Thanks.

Eamonn McManus answers the question What is an MXBean? in today's Weblogs: "One of the important new features of the JMX API in Mustang (Java SE 6) is the ability to create "MXBeans". MXBeans provide a convenient way to bundle related values together without requiring clients to be specially configured to handle the bundles. Here's the complete story about MXBeans."

Scott Oaks says "Recent experience using the NetBeans profiler has let me overcome my usual inertia toward new tools and fully embrace NetBeans." More reasons for his conversion can be found in The NetBeans profiler -- change is good.

However, Malcolm Davis is going the other direction. In Why are you uninstalling NetBeans IDE?, he writes "I was redirected to a uninstall survey after removing NetBeans 5.0. This blog discusses some of the reasons why I uninstalled this latest version of NetBeans."

In today's Forums, soupdragon says Let's do some tidying up e.g. JDBC: "JDBC carries minor but oft-encountered irritants, for example. Like why on Earth does it not use java.util.Date for it's times and dates? Who decided we needed a java.sql.Date? (thus resulting in many classes which have to use two different classes called Date) Like the (lack of) proper BLOB/CLOB handling, the current system seems to have been written by someone who didn't quite grasp how LOBs work."

robilad questions supposed openness in Re: What do you think?: "The JCP, unfortunately, is not very useful in its current form for something that important, as it is fundamentally encumbered in NDAs, and has huge transparency problems, in particular wrt to J2SE and JVM specs. This has all been known since JCP 2.6, and two years have passed without any changes to it or a movement to fix it. That does not make me very confident about the future relevance of the JCP."

In Projects and Communities, the JavaDesktop Community page notes that the Ensode.net article JDK 1.6 (AKA Mustang) Swing GTK Look And Feel Screenshots "got lots of diggs over the weekend." Ensode is pleased with the L&F, noting "as can be seen in the screenshots, Mustang picks up the GNOME theme and renders Swing components appropriately."

Kohsuke Kawaguchi's blog entry Hudson 1.0.14 introduces and explains the Hudson project, which monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as software builds. cron jobs, etc. "Since I'm a lowly engineer and don't have a secretary, I made one by myself some time ago. It's called Hudson, and it handles some of the work I used to do myself."

In Also in Java Today, Integration Developer News reports on a "good news, bad news" scenario for developers in Dev Jobs Outlook Bright for 2006: "In 2006, salaries for software architects and devs may finally see their biggest up ticks since the bubble burst, according to CIO survey conducted by Robert Half Technology (RHT) a leading recruiter of IT talent worldwide. But, RHA adds, with higher salaries will come bigger workloads. Among the big winners: professionals who can bridge high-tech and business needs by using web-to-legacy integration, analytics, SOA and security."

Bruce Eckel wonders Does Groovy Matter? "The last time I paid any attention to Groovy was when Mike Spille blogged about it, and when the Bile Blog chimed in. Basically they wrote off the project (albeit giving lots of details about why). But recently the Java Posse talked about it in slightly different tones, so it made me start wondering."

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The big picture behind BPEL
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