First impression of Oracle jDeveloper BPEL Beta2

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The last few days a colleague and I have been looking into a beta release of Oracle’s BPEL designer for jDeveloper. This tool enables you to orchestrate single web services into complete enterprise workflows using the Business Process Execution Language. First we went through a tutorial that was written for the Eclipse version of the BPEL designer. This way we were able to learn the concepts of BPEL. We were able to implement almost everything in the tutorial even though the JDeveloper version is slightly different from the Eclipse version.

Our first impression of the tools is that it is stable. We didn’t encounter big problems so far. We started with beta1 and are currently working with beta2 of the product. Beta2 gave us the possibility to make the database adapter work.

The picture below shows the diagram of the simple showcase we developed with the designer tool:
jDeveloper BPEL designer

This process calls a webservice to retreive the current temperature from a specific airport. The result of this service is then stored into an Oracle table using the database adapter.
Creating a database adapter is very easy. You simply click through a wizard where you can configure the database connection and the stored procedure you want to call. The tool then created a wsdl file that describes the behaviour of the partner link that is based on this database adapter.

We are now going to explore more of the possibilities of the jDeveloper BPEL plugin like the XSLT generator which will speed up handling XML files. We will also look into the possibilities to incluse Java (beans) in a BPEL process. We will post future experiences regarding these possibilities on this blog.