WSRP is an open standard proposed by OASIS for several years. The spec now is sponsored by a number of
big names like IBM and BEA. There are currently two active implementation of the spec. One is wsrp4j from
Apache foundation (still a incubator project, been developed since 2002). The other one is a subproject of
dev.java.net Open-Portal.
I have been exposed and done lot of development on the Apache's wsrp4j project. Thus, in this guide I will
mainly discuss wsrp4j implementation.
At this point, wsrp4j project is still under heavy development and re-construction. It is almost impossible
to get the trunk snapshot in the project repository and make it work without pulling all your hair out to figure
out how to set it up properly. This mostly caused by the lack of documentation and support from its developers.
Still, there is a stable (enough) revision which we can use to make a perfect wsrp4j environment.
The wsrp4j revison I use here is 440430 along with pluto portal 1.0.1 release for setting up a producer.
Jetspeed 2.1 (latest version currently) will be used as a container for wsrp4j consumer (wsrp4j-proxyportlet).
Of course, you can use pluto to setup wsrp4j consumer as well. But that is very easy to do.
Plus, pluto portal doesn't provide a lot of bell and whistle in the GUI side as Jetspeed portal does.
Reexamining the Limitations, Expectations, Capabilities and Misunderstandings of BPEL, as well as Executing BPMN Directly It seems that conventional wisdom has been for a while that "Business Process Execution Language" or "WS-BPEL4WS" is the standard for execution in the BPM space. At the same time, the majority of BPM and workflow products on the market today work successfully without using BPEL.
Looking at recent articles and various BPM solutions, it would be easy to assume that BPEL is now the defacto standard to be used when implementing a workflow engine. From a technical perspective this may well be correct, however few people will claim that BPEL can be easily understood by the end-user, a.k.a the business analyst, who definitely prefers a graph based notation such as BPMN.
InfoQ has gathered a virtual panel of Enterprise Architects who have lived and implemented SOA for most of this decade to better understand what SOA means to IT in 2009.
C. Krueger. PFE '01: Revised Papers from the 4th International Workshop on Software Product-Family Engineering, page 282--293. London, UK, Springer, (2002)