Back in March, I explained why using Eclipse was critical for a standards-based BPMS. Today, I will try to illustrate this with a couple of customer examples, as part of our second BPM 2.0 weekly series.

One of our customers is a large telecommunication services company. They are using the Intalio|BPMS in cunjunction with the Apache ServiceMix ESB in order to automate real-time processes related to Voice over IP (VoIP) applications. A significant part of their work involves the orchestration of services provided by the ESB, for which several Eclipse plugins are available today.

Having Intalio|Designer packaged as an Eclipse ‘feature’ (a collection of Eclipse plugins) makes it a lot easier for them to integrate the two components, share a single source control system, and streamline the collaborative development process, which involves business analysts using Intalio|Designer to design high-level business processes, and software engineers using ServiceMix tools to configure complex web services.

Another customer is a mid-sized independent software vendors developing CRM applications for retail banks. Over the years, they developed a complex framework that allows business consultants to tailor their applications to address the specific needs of their customers, usually through fairly sophisticated configuration tools. About ten years ago, a first version of this framework had been developed for the Sybase RDBMS, using a traditional client-server model. Over the past three years, a new version has been developed, using Eclipse as a development workbench.

Because Intalio|Designer also runs on top of Eclipse, it was a fairly trivial task for the customer to expose their propriatery services — which they call ‘engines’ — as a collection of WSDL services, and reuse them through simple drag-and-drop within any new BPMN process. Similarly to the previous example, having both environments run on top of the same framework made it possible to share a single source control system, and to better manage the lifecycle of business processes that would have multiple versions (as the vendor releases new version of its application), and multiple configurations (as multiple customers tailor the application in multiple ways).

Yet another customer had developed a proprietary workflow engine for J2EE, and built a workflow modeler on top of Eclipse. Over time, their customers started to demand support for emerging BPM standards, namely BPMN and BPEL, and they decided to work with us in order to integrate a standards-based BPMS into their offering, without having to develop it from scratch, or to re-engineer their existing platform, which would have been at least as much work as starting from scratch, and would have created major migration pains for existing customers.

Again, having both products built on top of Eclipse made it fairly simple to develop what we call a ‘projector’ for the vendor’s processes, to generate reusable process interfaces for them on the fly, and to show them through dedicated swimlanes within an end-to-end BPMN process map (a map made of multiple processes shown in parallel). With such an approach, new processes would run on top of Intalio|Server, while existing processes would still run on top of the vendor’s proprietary workflow engine.

Moving forward, it’s likely that only two major development environments will remain: Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio. If you’re working within a pure Microsoft environment, Visual Studio is the tool for you. But if you’re environment is more complex, I cannot think of any reason why not to use Eclipse, and having your process designer built on top of it will make integration with third-party components a lot easier.