Technical information on OW4J

Question

Hi,
I would very much appreciate if I can access some form of technical documentation on the OW4J product in order to assess / determine the following points:
1. In the presentation by Mark Craig & statement of direction, it is stated that OW4J follows "open standards", can anyone be more specific? I.e. does "Oracle" mean WfMC- XPDL, BPMI, BPMN, etc?
2. I am interested specifically to implement an open standard specification from OASIS ebXML-BP (BPSS) (www.ebXML.org), hence require mapping the ebXML-BP workflow XML to OW4J workflow XML.
Note: Perhaps some form of documentation on this feature would be very helpful in order to determine the possibilities of implementing other XML based BPM definition such as ebXML-BP - (BPSS). The XML definition that is used by the OW4J engine conforms to some standard, either an open standard, or Oracle based standard. A schema (.XSD) for the OW4J XML definition documents will be available to facilitate "translations" from / to other standards.
Finally, I understand that this might have very in depth discussions, however does OW4J overlap with BPEL product offered by Oracle? How does Oracle recommend / suggest interaction between these two products?
I wish to you your colleagues and OTN members a very happy new year.
Best regards,
Jesmond

Answer 1

Hi,
Ultimately, it depends on what you want to do, and what standards you want to adhere to.
OWF (PL/SQL version) does not conform to any standards - it's all proprietry, and so it makes it harder to integrate where Oracle isn't.
BPEL (although being an Oracle product) doesn't actually need a database at all - if you look at its heritage (coming from Collaxa), that's understandable. The first version I installed ran on JBoss instead of 9iAS! BPEL PM conforms to standards and is written in Java - and the interaction between people is getting better (which is one of the historical strengths of OWF). Everything is written in pure BPEL, with nothing proprietry there, so it can easily go where Oracle isn't. It's built for connecting systems, as you say, but connecting people is getting easier and better with BPEL. I've also found that getting info on BPEL is a bit easier
OW4J hasn't arrived yet. I don't know whether anything has been published regarding any standards support (or lack thereof), but I certainly haven't heard anything about it. Personally, I can't see the point of OW4J - the strength of Workflow is it's ability to embed in the Oracle database, in which case PL/SQL is fine.
So my recommendation would be:
- If you want standards and Java, go with BPEL.
- If you want to embed in the database and run very quickly with PL/SQL, go with Oracle Workflow.
- Avoid thinking about OW4J until it's available (and then proven that it does the job, is scalable etc. etc.)
HTH,
Matt