Month: August 2002

Orchestration, Workflow, Business Process, Collaxa

With the release of BPEL4WS spec written by Microsoft, IBM, and BEA, web service orchestration has turned a major corner.  With W3C and OASIS at odds and web application companies like Siebel, PeopleSoft, SAP, and Oracle not yet committed, I suspect that web service orchestration market will remain a battlefield for at least another year despite all the hypes.

One seemingly vain yet important issue is the lack of a name everyone can agree on and hype about.  Whether its called orchestration, workflow, business process management, or choreography, lets just pick one and stick with it.  Obviously, no single faction among the competitors can dictate this, so the media must play its hand.  Meanwhile I'll call it Web Service Workflow or WSW for short.

Only ready-for-deployment implementation of WSW I know of is Collaxa's WSOS.  Collaxa is not only the first to market, they have shown amazing agility.  For example, I mentioned XDoclet syntax to Doron Sherman, Collaxa CTO, as a way to avoid extending Java with orchestration specific keywords.  A few weeks later, it was done, documented, and downloadable!  Now they are working hard on adding BPEL support.  If you need a WSW solution now and want to avoid the danger of choosing the loser of WSW standards war, you can't do better than Collaxa because, no matter which of proposed standards wins, I am sure Collaxa will support it.

Reflection of First Reflection

Scott Loftesness was the first to reflect my thoughts on the reflective nature of blogging.  Thanks Scott.  I really enjoy talking with people like Scott and Dave [Winer] because there is a startling lack of 'intellectual resistence' or struggle to explain.  With just a few words and a bit of clarification to sort out alternate interpretations is all one needs.

Blogspace reminds me of the mirror room scene in Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon.  While there are different types of blogging ranging from diary to router styles, one attribute shared by majority of blogs is: reflective.  In other words, blogs reflect thoughts similar to the way mirrors reflect images.  If a blog is a mirror, a world of blog is a world of mirrors, a strange and disorienting world of reflections.

Within minutes of my first blog post, Dave Winer commented on my blog (thanks Dave;) in his blog which serves similar role as Netscape Navigator's default home page: Blogspace Home.  In terms of my mirror world metaphor, Dave's Scripting.com is like the huge mirror on the ceiling.

Lets see which mirror reflects this reflection of my thoughts…

Hello World

For many years, I have watched the Blog phenomenon unfold with Dave Winer, a friend I have known since his Living Video Text days, in the middle of it.  I have avoided blogging mainly because I instinctively felt that blogging is not only as addictive as smoking, but also changes how one thinks and behaves day by day.  Whether the effects of bloggin is good or not, I cannot stay away any longer.  So off I go into Blogspace.