New alpha release of Petals BPM

The guys from the Petals BPM team just released a new alpha version of Petals BPM, a Web-based, open source BPM modeler.

Petals BPM Choregraphy

New features mainly deals with collaboration and choregraphy design which are part of BPMN 2.0 specification. A complete release note is available at http://research.petalslink.org/display/petalsbpm/PetalsBPM+v1.0-alpha-3+release+note.

There is also a deployment module which allows to deploy your workflow directly to a SOA infrastructure. This is what I explained last year during the last OW2Con conference:

1. Model your process
2. Import services from your services infrastructure with the help of the governance module
3. Create mappings between model and services
4. Deploy the ‘runtime model’ to the infrastructure
5. Run it!

So what if the services infrastructure is in the Cloud? You ‘simply’ run your business process in the Cloud, from the design phase to the runtime one.
While waiting for this all-in-cloud solution, you can start looking and trying Petals BPM directly at http://bpmneditor.ebmwebsourcing.com/ or download it at http://research.petalslink.org/display/petalsbpm/Downloads

Feel free to contact developers at http://research.petalslink.org/display/petalsbpm/Community or on the Petals Forum.

OW2Con2011 Videos are online

The videos of all the OW2Con2011 have been published to the OW2 Youtube channel. My talk about Petals BPM and The Cloud is also available.

You are right, I need to smile more, be less tired and have a demo of the BPM editor working on low resolution displays… BTW, the demo of the DSB Monitoring & Management console used to deploy and monitor BPEL process works.

Back From OW2Con 2011

I was in Paris last week for the OW2 annual conference and I gave a talk called « Petals BPM and the Cloud » during the Open Cloud Summit Session (wow what a name!). This talk was about showing that we have things running and ready to be published in the Cloud. As I said during my talk, difficulty is not to provide the SaaS layer, pushing a Web app to the Cloud is not so hard (and not so interesting). The interesting part is about building the PaaS layer. In the current case, the PaaS will provide « Integration as a Service », or how we can use Petals Service Bus, to provide ways to integrate, orchestrate, manage and monitoring business services.

My son is an open source fan

So let’s go back on my talk, where I planned to show things working… Unfortunately, I was not able to show anything due to some low resolution problems and this was really a shame; next time I will prepare a video in case of something like that happens. I am going to record these videos this week to show that we have interesting things under development : We can create business processes with Petals BPM and deploy them on the service bus in order to execute and monitor the process itself in a distributed way.

While waiting these videos, here are the slides of my talk. There are sort of ‘zen’ slides so the talk I gave was really important to understand all… So come and see me next time, or just send me comments.

For the other parts of the conference, as usual, there were really interesting presentations and discussions around OW2, open source and Cloud. One fun thing which I learnt was that OW2-Jonas is used in MS Azure Cloud solution as support of J2EE apps (can I also inform that Microsoft was a big sponsor of OW2Con? Yes, really, they gave money for an open source conference, that’s fun). Well, there were so many interesting things and I can not list all here. But open source is really something companies should have a look if they do not did it already, they will be surprised to see how active and professional is the community behind it.

Related articles

• Let’s talk at OW2Con 2011 (chamerling.org)

Let’s talk at OW2Con 2011

This year again, I submitted a talk proposal to the OW2 annual conference and it has just been approved by the OW2 management office.

While last year I spoke about some conceptual things around the Distributed Service Bus and the Cloud, this year I will go one step further with some live demonstrations not only dealing with service bus stuff, but also with some BPM tools and the Cloud stack we actively develop in the research team at PetalsLink. Here is my talk proposal:

All the services are moving to the Cloud, so are business processes. In this talk, we will show how to create collaborative business processes using an open source SaaS BPMN Editor. But designing business processes is not enough, why not running them in the Cloud? We will see that we can rely on a completely Cloud-aware SOA software infrastructure combining several open sources solutions such as a Service Bus and IaaS framework. The resulting ‘Cloud Service Bus’ allows the integration of in-house services in order to benefit from Cloud-based features such as elasticity, load balancing, service clustering and migration. This Cloud Service Bus will serve as the runtime basis of the business processes producing a Petals Cloud Stack solution. All in the Cloud, all open source!

I really hope to have time to work on some cool things to add more foggy-cloudy stuff and have things running on a real cloud infrastructure. I have many ideas in my mind these days and it is really really really cool.

Oh and I will also talk a bit about what we are currently building in the Play FP7 project. We have to show things in two weeks at the European Commission and these things are really interesting to share with OW2 attendees and staff.

BTW, I think that there is some free beer social event this year at OW2Con, see you there of course!

OW2Con 2011, call for presentations

Ca y est, le call pour OW2Con 2011 est lancé, il n’y a plus qu’à y répondre! Sur la lignée de ce que j’ai présenté l’an dernier, je pense soumettre quelque chose plus axé sur une démonstration en montrant la chaine complète SOA et BPM orientée Cloud que nous sommes en train de développer activement au département R&D de PetalsLink.

PetalsLinkLabs Stack

Following the successes of the 2009 and 2010 editions of OW2 Annual Conference, we are very pleased to launch now OW2Con 2011, that will take place on November 23 and 24 in Orange Labs’ innovative and professional conference site « Issy Innovation Garden » in Paris.
The event will offer two days of high-level technical presentations around open source middleware technologies and generic applications. This will be a unique opportunity for attendees and sponsors of the event to meet with peers and network with the international open source community at large. All sessions will take place in English language, including technical and business presentations, and featuring the OW2 Open Source Cloudware Initiative. Parallel sessions (BoFs, side events, third parties projects) will complete the program. Among the main novelties that will be included in the OW2Con 2011 program, the « SQUAT » project (Software Quality Assurance and Trustworthiness) is a major one. Unique program of this kind, SQuAT has the aim to improve the quality of code by generalizing quality tests on OW2 technologies and setting up a quality label. Additionally, one year after the launch of the Open Source Cloudware Initiative and the involvement in current or future collaborative projects, OW2 has reaffirmed its position as a main actor in the open source cloud computing area that will be demonstrated during the conference.

Source, http://www.ow2.org/view/Events/OW2AnnualConference2011