This is the tenth edition of our weekly BPM 2.0 post. Today, I will try to explain why generating web services on the fly is important. Unless you’re still living in the workflow-centric world of the 90’s, you know by now why BPEL matters. Problem is, the only thing BPEL understands is web services, and only one very narrow type of web service at that — WSDL. Here is the bad news: if you need to orchestrate transactions that are not yet exposed as web services, BPEL won’t help you. BEA suggested support for Java with the BPELJ specification, but I do not know any process analyst who likes to write Java code, so we’ll pass, thank you very much. Now the good news: a good BPM 2.0 product can give you web services for free out of pretty much anything out there.

According to the BPM 2.0 model, web service interfaces should be generated on the fly for any application or middleware system that supports some form of API, and there are very few that do not today. Even legacy mainframe systems can expose APIs through the use of common screen-scraping tools. A good BPMS will be able to leverage these APIs and generate web service interfaces for it. Furthermore, the BPM 2.0 model also states that such interfaces should be offered for both inbound and outbound transactions, meaning that a BPMS can invoke a transaction with a third-party system through a web service interface (inbound), while a third-party system can call a process deployed on a BPMS through a very similar interface (outbound).

This answers a question that we get all the time: “do I need SOA to use BPM?” The answer is both “yes” and “no”. Yes, you need SOA to use BPM, for that’s how the BPEL execution model was designed. But no, you do not need to have your Service Oriented Architecture in place before being able to use BPM, for the mere installation of a good BPMS will SOA-enable most of what you already have, or at least it should. If you pick the right BPMS, it will come with an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and a Service Repository that are the cornerstones of any Service Oriented Architecture worth using. In other words, buy BPM 2.0 and you’ll get SOA for free. And if you’re lucky enough to pick an Open Source BPMS, you won’t even have to pay for it. Is this a good deal, or what?