Product Description

Topics covered include: The fundamentals of business process modeling, including workflow patterns, an in-depth treatment of process flexibility, including approaches to dealing with on-the-fly changes, unexpected exceptions, and constraint-based processes, Technological aspects of a modern BPM environment, including its architecture,  process design environment, process engine, resource handler and other support services, a comparative insight into current approaches to business process modeling and execution such as BPMN, EPCs, BPEL, jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark, process mining, verification, integration and configuration; and case studies in health care and screen business.

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the field of Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on Business Process Automation. It achieves this by covering a wide range of topics, both introductory and advanced, illustrated through and grounded in the YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language) language and corresponding open-source support environment. In doing so it provides the reader with a deep, timeless, and vendor-independent understanding of the essential ingredients of business process automation.

The BPM field is in a continual state of flux and is subject to both the ongoing proposal of new standards and the introduction of new tools and technology. Its fundamentals however are relatively stable and this book aims to equip the reader with both a thorough understanding of them and the ability to apply them to better understand, assess and utilize new developments in the BPM field.

As a consequence of its topic-based format and the inclusion of a broad range of exercises, the book is eminently suitable for use in tertiary education, both at the undergraduate and the postgraduate level, for students of computer science and information systems. BPM researchers and practitioners will also find it a valuable resource. The book serves as a unique reference to a varied and comprehensive collection of topics that are relevant to the business process life-cycle.

Modern Business Process Automation: YAWL and its Support Environment

ActiveBPEL Designer is a comprehensive Eclipse Ready™ BPEL authoring environment. The product includes extensive productivity features to speed developers through the BPEL design and testing cycle, including advanced visual controls, runtime simulation, integrated debugging and 100% standard BPEL code generation.

“We are very pleased to make the ActiveBPEL Designer freely available to the IT community,” said Fred Holahan, Chairman and co-founder, Active Endpoints. “The ActiveBPEL Designer is often cited as the best BPEL design and test environment available today. By providing organizations with free and easy alternatives for acquiring, using and redistributing this world-class product, we aim to accelerate the adoption of BPEL.”

ActiveBPEL Designer – Visual, Productive, Standard.
ActiveBPEL Designer is an Eclipse Ready environment that includes the following key features:

• Process Visualization: intuitive, drag and drop diagram editing that allows users to rapidly construct process diagrams of any complexity. When process design is completed, users can perform visual runtime simulation and debugging, significantly reducing QA cycle times.

• High-productivity Instrumentation: high-productivity visual controls that provide easy access to the most common BPEL related resources. Users can quickly locate, register and use their WSDL resources; create reusable BPEL process artifacts (BPELets™); and access a number of pluggable language environments for advanced data integration, mapping and transformation.

• Uncompromising BPEL Support: out-of-the-box support for any BPEL 1.1 processes. ActiveBPEL users can easily render diagrams by importing existing BPEL process definitions, and they can readily generate BPEL process definitions from any ActiveBPEL diagram. BPEL generated by ActiveBPEL can be executed by any BPEL 1.1 compliant engine.

“Our early successes with SOA have raised new opportunities and requirements, particularly in the area of BPEL-based, composite applications,” said Asit Bhattacharya, Senior Software Engineer, Vodafone Plc. “We knew we had discovered a world-class BPEL authoring solution as soon as we began using the ActiveBPEL Designer. It fits right in to our Eclipse tooling framework and provides an exceptional level of development productivity. The process simulator alone was of significant value, saving us critical QA time as we bullet-proofed our applications.”

Availability
ActiveBPEL Designer is freely available for immediate download at www.active-endpoints.com/freebpel. Additional information about Active Endpoints’ products and services can be obtained by contacting the Company at +1.203.929.9400 ext. 709 or info@active-endpoints.com and by visiting www.active-endpoints.com.

In related news, the Company also announced that it has unified all products under the ActiveBPEL family name and announced general availability of ActiveBPEL 2.0, a comprehensive family of open source and commercial products for building, testing, deploying and managing composite, service-oriented applications. Please visit www.active-endpoints.com/newspr to read the full release.

About Active Endpoints, Inc.
Active Endpoints is the leading provider of BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) solutions. Active Endpoints’ solutions enable organizations to go beyond simple application connections to build and deploy composite, process-driven information systems based on BPEL, the next generation Web services orchestration standard. From open source to mission critical deployments, Active Endpoints empowers IT organizations to quickly adapt to evolving customer demands – reducing the cost of integration, leveraging infrastructure investments and enabling the sharing of business processes with customers, partners and suppliers. More financial services, government, telecommunications, high technology, and retail organizations use Active Endpoints’ solutions than any other BPEL technology. Headquartered in Shelton, Connecticut, Active Endpoints is privately held. More information is available at www.active-endpoints.com.

ActiveBPEL, ActiveWebflow and BPELet are trademarks of Active Endpoints, Inc. Eclipse and Eclipse Ready are trademarks of Eclipse Foundation, Inc. All other company and product names are the property of their respective owners.

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