Heureka

[PeterB]

Hi all,

I`ve just found the new location of the tutorials. The URL is:
http://se.uni-hannover.de/pages/de:tutorials

I think it would be nice to have the links on the BPELUnit website
updated.

Cheers
Peter

[Antonio García Domínguez]

Hi Peter,

Actually, I believe that's an older website. It appears we forgot to
move some of the stuff from there to bpelunit.net, and then to
bpelunit.github.com.

Cheers,
Antonio

[Peter Bormann]

Hi Antonio, 

 

> Actually, I believe that's an older website. It appears we forgot to

> move some of the stuff from there to bpelunit.net, and then to
> bpelunit.github.com.

No, I've just checked both websites: all links to the tutorials are dead.

  The reason is that the location of the tutorials on the server of the university of Hannover has changed, so it would still be a good idea to update the links on the websites mentioned above.

Just another question: Is it possible to ask BPEL-related questions in this 

Google group, too? My impression is that some of the tutorials provided by 

the SW department of the university of Hannover being necessary for the BPELunit tutorials don`t work when deployed on Apache ODE.  

And finding errors with the Eclipse BPEL Designer, at least for a BPEL beginner like me, is a pain in the neck: I need 5-10 minutes to model a simple BPEL (tutorial) program. But, in addition, I usually need several hours just to  correct minor errors in my program.  And that`s very frustrating. 

Cheers,

Peter

[Antonio García Domínguez]

Hi Peter,

On 8 December 2011 13:17, Peter Bormann <borm...@googlemail.com> wrote:
>   The reason is that the location of the tutorials on the server of the
> university of Hannover has changed, so it would still be a good idea to
> update the links on the websites mentioned above.

@Daniel: do you still have access to the old Hannover website?

> Just another question: Is it possible to ask BPEL-related questions in this
> Google group, too? My impression is that some of the tutorials provided by
> the SW department of the university of Hannover being necessary for the
> BPELunit tutorials don`t work when deployed on Apache ODE.

Well, I can try to help. I'm more familiar with ActiveBPEL than with
ODE, but if you don't use any ODE-specific extensions it should be
fine.

> And finding errors with the Eclipse BPEL Designer, at least for a BPEL
> beginner like me, is a pain in the neck: I need 5-10 minutes to model a
> simple BPEL (tutorial) program. But, in addition, I usually need several
> hours just to  correct minor errors in my program.  And that`s very
> frustrating.

Yes, that's a common problem with BPEL: you can't just quickly whip up
a BPEL composition in Emacs or Vim. You really need a good IDE for it.
The BPEL editor in the SOA edition of NetBeans 6.7 was quite nice, and
it was integrated with Glassfish + ODE, if I recall correctly. Some of
the students doing BPEL processes as third year projects at our
university used NetBeans to write the BPEL composition and then
switched to Eclipse + BPELUnit to test it. I'm afraid NetBeans dropped
the SOA components in 6.9 or so, though.

There's something called BPELScript which looked rather promising [1],
but development seems to be stalled. It might be useful to you in its
current form, though.

What sort of problem are you running into when fixing your program?
Complex syntax? Incomplete error logging?

[1]: http://bpelscript.org/

Cheers,
Antonio

[Daniel Luebke]

Hi Peter,

I think we all can try to help. However and unfortunately, all open
source BPEL editors I have seen so far are more or less useless. The
Eclipse one is under heavy restructuring since Red Hat took over but
that's some while ago and I have seen no version that really works as
expected. This is a pity especially ODE, BPEL Editor + BPELUnit could
be a great BPEL development environment.
That being said the processes will deploy even if there are errors in
the Eclipse editor and vice versa.

Daniel

On 8 Dez., 13:34, Antonio García Domínguez <nyoesc...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi Peter,

[Peter Bormann]

Hey Antonio & Daniel, 

> I think we all can try to help. 

Thank you very much! I appreciate any help that I can get. 

 

> This is a pity especially ODE, BPEL Editor + BPELUnit could

> be a great BPEL development environment.

I completely agree with you, Daniel. I`m just working on a master`s thesis project where I have to  combine BPMN / BPEL with SCA and some other technologies such as GWT. So, it would be great to be able to use only open source software (in my case: ODE, BPEL Editor, BPELUnit, Apache SCA Tuscany, etc.). But, unfortunately, the Eclipse BPEL Editor is no big help, esp. for starters.  

In general, I`m quite patient when it comes to IT / software stuff. But I´m always 

annoyed when a program behaves more or less "erratically". And that`s the im- pression I got from the "BPEL Editor". Example: Sometimes (while trying to correct a very simple BPEL program) an error seemed to arrive out of the blue and when I restarted Eclipse, the error was gone.  

Maybe those are the quirks of the "BPEL Editor" users have to deal with. But I found this program behavior  "astonishing" (in a negative sense). 

 

> That being said the processes will deploy even if there are errors in

> the Eclipse editor and vice versa.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no.      

Anyway, for my master`s thesis project I intend to switch to ActiveVOS because 

I need an automatic BPMN2BPEL mapping. In comparison to ActiveVOS,  open source tools such as the academic version of Oryx, Adonis Community Edition and Intalio Designer were rather disappointing. 

But I still want to use the Eclipse BPEL Editor for checking / correcting the BPEL processes used as SCA components in the Apache SCA Tuscany runtime because the BPEL Editor, SCA Tuscany and the SCA Tools are all integrated in Eclipse.  

> Well, I can try to help. I'm more familiar with ActiveBPEL than with
> ODE, but if you don't use any ODE-specific extensions it should be
> fine.

No, I think it`s wise to avoid such extensions (in my case: ActiveVOS BPEL extensions) because they might cause a lot of problems with the Apache SCA Tuscany runtime.   

 

> Yes, that's a common problem with BPEL: you can't just quickly whip up
> a BPEL composition in Emacs or Vim. You really need a good IDE for it.

Absolutely! Another thing is that you just can`t switch to the source code to correct something manually. BPEL code is not only very verbose compared to traditional 

programming languages, but also quite difficult to read. So, it`s best  to stick to the "graphic" programming style once and for all - and that might not always be a blessing.   

 

> There's something called BPELScript which looked rather promising [1],

> but development seems to be stalled. It might be useful to you in its
> current form, though.

Thanks! I`ll check it out. But, as I wrote above, I'm going to try ActiveVOS because I really need an automatic BPMN2BPEL mapping. I don`t want to do

this transformation manually in my project. 

 

> What sort of problem are you running into when fixing your program?
> Complex syntax? Incomplete error logging?

No, in fact, the syntax is "very" simple because I'm using the tutorials of the SW department of the university of Hannover and the following tutorials: 

http://www-inf.it-sudparis.eu/~nguyen_n/teaching_assistant/bpel

Let me just say for now that I got the impression that sometimes small, but nonetheless important steps were missing in some of the tutorials.  Quick example: 

When installing Tomcat and ODE at first, I got the error message "Server port in Use Http 8080" . Solution: you have to add "tomcat-juli.jar" in ODE`s "launch confi-guration" in Eclipse. 

In the Hannover tutorials this information is missing, but in Nguyen`s tutorials this problem is mentioned. OK, this is trivial. Nevertheless, it took me quite some time to find the right solution because I assumed that there was a problem with the different versions of Tomcat and ODE.

As I`m doing some of the tutorials and the case study in "Geschäftsprozesse automatisieren mit BPEL" right now, I´ll be able to give some more concrete examples regarding BPEL in the days to come. 

Cheers (and thanks in advance for any help!), 

Peter

 

[Daniel Luebke]

Hi Peter,

the tutorials from the SE page are a couple of years old. With the
formly recent versions there weren't such problems. However, I think
that any hints regarding the ODE tutorials will be highly appreciated
by Kai who currently maintains them.

Daniel

[Daniel Luebke]

Hi,

I (finally) updated both bpelunit.net and bpelunit.github.com.

Daniel

On Dec 7, 10:03 pm, Antonio García Domínguez <nyoesc...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi Peter,

[Peter Bormann]

Hi Daniel, 

 

> the tutorials from the SE page are a couple of years old.

I don`t know if it`s the tutorials, me or Eclipse when something fails . Normally, I`d say it`s me. But one main problem I`ve got is the following: I`m not able to import BPEL-archives correctly. 

I`ve tried several options: 

* import the archive directly

* unzip the archive and then import it 

* copy the unzipped archive into the webapps/ODE folder explicitly

 - nothing worked. 

To be more precise: The archive is represented  in the BPEL Designer, but the webapps/ODE folder (at least with the first two import options) is empty so that I get the "endpoint reference error"  I mentioned in my last email. 

After more than one hour of trying, I`ve given up and built the BPEL process from scratch - and it worked. 

When I told Kai about the import problem, he couldn`t reproduce it. 

So, there seems to be some small, but vital information missing 

that`s neither in the tutorials nor in the BPEL book you wrote with Tammo und Joerg [BTW: excellent book - I learned a lot from it!]. 

 

> However, I think that any hints regarding the ODE tutorials 

> will be highly appreciated by Kai who currently maintains 

> them.

Yes, I`ve already contacted him with the import problem. I`ll contact him again if I find any other problems. 

Unfortunately, I`m a bit under pressure right now and I`ve got to focus on ActivesVOS and a bunch of other technologies (SCA, GWT, etc.). 

Cheers

Peter