Comments on: Distributed Compensation with REST and jBPM

By: Pros and cons of standards | The thoughts of an IT professional

Pros and cons of standards | The thoughts of an IT professional — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 01:54:17 +0000

[...] was reading Bill Burke`s post on transaction compensation via REST and JBPM and I have to tell that I agree with most of his [...]

By: Client driven business activity « Angry Bill

Client driven business activity « Angry Bill — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:55:22 +0000

[...] Distributed Compensation with REST and jBPM [...]

By: Web Things, by Mark Baker » Blog Archive » Fence sitting arguments

Web Things, by Mark Baker » Blog Archive » Fence sitting arguments — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 04:32:02 +0000

[...] Little responds to an interesting post by Bill Burke about compensation based transactions. I don’t really have any direct response [...]

By: Mark Little

Mark Little — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 16:39:22 +0000

I’m not sure what you mean by enterprise features, but there are BPEL implementations that are reliable and fault-tolerant, providing transactional capabilities and recovery, including fault/exception handling. But BPEL definitely wasn’t designed for human tasks. It’ll be interesting to see how BPEL4People develops. I think jBPM should track that, but that’s a separate issue.

By: billburke

billburke — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 14:10:16 +0000

Mark, maybe WS-BPEL doesn’t have the enterprise features that jBPM has? Like the ones I linked to in this blog? Maybe that is the problem? Also, BPEL doesn’t have the human task modelling either correct? That’s why the BPEL for People spec was initiated?

By: Mark Little

Mark Little — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 13:56:47 +0000

I think a workflow platform (BPM being part of that) is definitely more appropriate in a lot of cases. But remember that WS-BA came out of WS-BPEL’s need for reliable compensations. Anyway, I’m writing a blog entry to respond to this.

By: billburke

billburke — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 13:40:11 +0000

Mark, I mean REST over HTTP in particular here, but you’re right, even restlike styles combined with vanilla WS, CORBA, XML-RPC, or even Java RMI would be fine probably. In the case where bpm is modelling the compensation work, probably the most important restlike style is idempotency. Without it you’d need a distributed transaction to maintain consistency when you’re processing an individual state in a business process. Over a long running activity though, I’m still thinking that bpm may be the more appropriate for managing compensations than a generic coordinator like WS-BA even if you do combine it with individual, short distributed transactions.

By: Mark Little

Mark Little — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:54:57 +0000

Bill, by REST in this posting, do you really mean as it is used within the WWW? REST is an architectural style, so it could be used elsewhere and without HTTP.