Even though BPMN’s authoring organization BPMI.org merged within UML’s steward OMG last year, I do not expect BPMN to be merged within UML anytime soon. The two notations were developed by separate communities with different backgrounds, and getting these to recognize the value of each other’s work is no small task. Nevertheless, both are very complementary: one does for processes what the other does for objects, and marrying them would extend the scope of BPM 2.0’s idea for Zero Code and One Click Deploy from processes only to both processes and objects. In order to realize the vision, Intalio recently acquired the rights on some best-in-class UML technology.

According to the terms of the deal, we cannot publicly disclose the name of the product for which we acquired unrestricted rights, nor the name of the company that developed it originally. Nevertheless, I am at liberty to indicate that the product is the only implementation of all UML 2.0 diagrams natively built for Eclipse. It makes extensive use of the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) and supports the XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) format for the serialization of all supported diagrams.

In order to facilitate the integration of this technology within Intalio|BPMS, the entire engineering team that built it originally is in the process of joining Intalio. The roadmap is an aggressive yet pragmatic one. The goal is not to provide a tool that can support any notation — Microsoft Visio and IDS Scheer ARIS are good enough for that. Instead, the idea is to extend the scope to which extent Intalio|BPMS supports the Zero Code and One Click Deploy paradigms. As a first step, we will add support for UML Class Diagrams and offer the generation of EJB3 components and corresponding WSDL interfaces automatically, using Hibernate or Kodo as database persistence layer. Later on, we will add support for other UML diagrams, based on customer demand for them and following our now-popular Demand Driven Development program. Along the way, we will add support for the Eclipse Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) for all supported diagrams.

If you want to learn more about these developments, feel free to drop me a line.