Articles by Dave Shaffer

SOA World Magazine "BPEL's Growing Up"

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:15:00 EDT

IT architectures have evolved to include process orchestration as a fundamental layer due in no small part to the emergence and widespread adoption of the WS-BPEL standard. WS-BPEL, also known as Business Process Execution Language or just BPEL, is a standard owned by OASIS that provides rich and comprehensive orchestration semantics. This article will provide a brief overview of how BPEL came to be what it is today and then focus on the latest developments in the BPEL standard and where we believe this standards area will go over the next few years. In particular some of the key areas for growth in this space include the standardization of human workflow support and better integration with process modeling and analysis tools and standards.

Best Practices for Building SOA Applications

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 12:15:00 EDT

This article is the second part of a two-part series covering best practices for building Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications. The following are the seven key steps for effective SOA adoption:

Best Practices for Building SOA Applications

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 15:45:00 EDT

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) facilitates the development of applications as modular business services that can be easily integrated, secured, and administered. Benefits of an SOA approach include more-rapid development, decreased maintenance and change management costs, and improved business visibility. However, achieving these benefits isn't automatic - although many early adopters of SOA have been able to realize its promise fully, others have struggled to find the best architecture and design patterns for this approach.

Web Services Platforms Emerge

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 15:00:00 EDT

J2EE application servers enabled mainstream developers to build sophisticated multitiered Web applications that use mature standards and any of several commercial and open source application server platforms. A similar pattern has now emerged with the maturation of standard platforms for enabling service-oriented architecture (SOA) through Web services. These Web services platforms provide the same mainstream developer community with design patterns for implementing composite applications that leverage adapters, integration, transformation, business process management, and Web services. This article examines the key requirements for an effective Web services platform, related standards, and what impact this is having on developers and enterprise IT.

Process-Centric Realization of SOA

Fri, 05 Nov 2004 00:00:00 EST

Agile and adaptive business processes and supporting IT infrastructure are the holy grail of enterprise applications. The industry is heading in the right direction to start delivering on this promise.

WSIF & JSR-208

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 00:00:00 EDT

There's a common misconception that Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) is useful only if all of your systems are Web services. This article describes how Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) enables BPEL to orchestrate nearly any legacy system as if it were a Web service - without having to explicitly wrap or publish it as one.