Sunday, September 14, 2003

From UML to BPEL

Keith Mantell at IBM wrote an article on using UML and MDA concepts to gen your bpel. See:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-uml2bpel/

He creates a UML profile that has the semantics to represent bpel and then discusses making a map from the model to the bpel code. The base process is represented as a class and the orchestration is modeled as an Activity Diagram.

All in all, it is an interesting concept. One concern that I have is that people don't try too hard to shove a square peg (UML) into a triangular hole (SOA & BPEL). The base UML models were developed some time back and don't always represent the concepts that we need. For instance, I use a Service-Based Sequence Diagram rather than Activity Diagrams to represent orchestrations... just seems easier.

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