Oracle BPEL - experience as a workflow engine

    It all started one day when I received a link to Oracle BPEL and instructed to explore it. For those who don’t know, BPEL is a language for describing business processes, Oracle BPEL is, among other things, a workflow engine. It all started well, the installation went smoothly, everything seemed to start, but one function was lacking, without which it is simply impossible to live.


    Rummaging through the forums, I found that a patch for our version would save us. The patch was installed strangely, in the documentation for installing the patch, some folders were described that I simply did not have. What's the f ** ck? After long dances with a tambourine, for some reason I was struck by the idea of ​​going back to the site with the files for download. It was a revelation for me that initially I put the wrong one. It was necessary to download a file with a similar long name, but without the word BPEL, i.e. solve the problem by contradiction.

    This thing was called simply SOA - Service Oriented Application, it contained BPEL and even something else (I installed SOA BPEL before). After installing a new product and patch, I was delighted to see the start page in the browser. But it was not there. Tasks disappeared after launch. Poke the mouse back and forth and found them, but nothing could be done with them.

    Having depressed again, he began dancing with a tambourine and found swearing at NLS - National Language Settings. I tried to make the system forget about the Russian language forever, but she didn’t want to, the Russian roots made themselves felt. I had to install the English version of windows. As I expected, this helped, but not to the end. For some reason, the system swore at the lack of memory, although there was enough memory. I had to allow more memory usage.

    After such ordeals, Oracle BPEL began to work. Do you think this is the end? Not at all. Then the problems began with the API. Very poor documentation makes you go to the Oracle forum to find the right information. Often I came across similar problems, which I often had no answer there.

    What can you say about Oracle BPEL if it still works for you as it should? This is a language for real programmers. You need to know XPath, and understand web service calls. You cannot make arbitrary transitions between tasks. Apparently BPEL was written by people who really like structural programming and hate the GOTO operator. A normal workflow just needs to have tricky goto transitions.

    BPEL has to do a lot to do simple things. BPEL was originally created as a language for working with services and poorly fits the role of a workflow engine. For some reason, the authors of BPEL made it so that with any error the whole process crashes. But in real life, business processes can last for months and restore the process to its former state - a difficult task. With such errors, it would be logical to stop at the problematic step in order to be able to fix the error without restarting the process.

    In addition, the system as a whole is unstable and errors are detected during operation, which can be resolved by restarting or reinstalling. Perhaps this was due to the fact that I used Oracle Express Edition instead of the usual Oracle Server.
    I also forgot to say that it is possible to install Oracle Lite, but the patched BPEL does not work with it at all.

    The following versions were used during the work:
    Oracle SOA Suite 10g 10.1.3.1, patch 10.1.3.5
    Oracle Express Edition 10.2.0.1

    All success in learning Oracle.

    Also popular now: