Petals BPM Choregraphy

New features mainly deals with collaboration and choregraphy design which are part of BPMN 2.0 specification. A complete release note is available at http://research.petalslink.org/display/petalsbpm/PetalsBPM+v1.0-alpha-3+release+note.

There is also a deployment module which allows to deploy your workflow directly to a SOA infrastructure. This is what I explained last year during the last OW2Con conference:

1. Model your process
2. Import services from your services infrastructure with the help of the governance module
3. Create mappings between model and services
4. Deploy the ‘runtime model’ to the infrastructure
5. Run it!

So what if the services infrastructure is in the Cloud? You ‘simply’ run your business process in the Cloud, from the design phase to the runtime one.
While waiting for this all-in-cloud solution, you can start looking and trying Petals BPM directly at http://bpmneditor.ebmwebsourcing.com/ or download it at http://research.petalslink.org/display/petalsbpm/Downloads

Feel free to contact developers at http://research.petalslink.org/display/petalsbpm/Community or on the Petals Forum.

At a first view, the git and Eclipse does not provide the same integration level as Eclipse and the old SVN guy do. So let’s Google this… Wow, no real tutorial… So I tried to make it work all alone and here is the solution I found:

1. Clone your repository with your favorite git client (The terminal does it well!)
2. Look at the video below, it should be better to look than to read…

Note that using this approach will not create some folders with timestamped names like Eclipse does if you use the Maven import from SCM action.

Hi dear Petals community!

Petals Studio has been updated to fix a few bugs which were hampering user experience, notably in JBI editor. It also brings a few minor improvements. Please refer to the Petals Studio 1.3.1 release note for more details.

Update is heartily recommended. If you already installed Petals Studio 1.3.0, you can get the update through the built-in tool (menu "Help" > "Check for updates").

Otherwise, the fresh build is waiting for you in the usual place: download Petals Studio 1.3.1

Petals team

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The faithful companion of Petals ESB, Petals Studio, comes back in fresh 1.3.0 version!

What does bring this latest release?

Compatibility with Petals ESB 4.0 component
As already mentioned in Petals ESB 4.0 notice, we selected the most popular components which would get new technical and messages monitoring system as a priority.
Petals Studio has been updated in answer to keep wizard compatibility with these new component versions.

More intuitive terminology
So far, any component configuration, be it as a service provider or service consumer, was called a "Service Unit", concept taken straight from the JBI (Java Business Integration) standard.

From now on, we will be calling them "Petals services". Studio wizards have been modified to reflect this by dividing the old wizard into two new dedicated ones (one for services consumers, one for services providers). This should clarify new services creation.

Improvments on EIP designer
The use of graphical designer is now the sole option to create EIP (Enterprise Integration Patterns) services. The related component wizard has been removed. This change was brought for sake of clarity (more intuitive) and respect of good practices (since a single EIP service alone is useless, it is supposed to be chained with other EIP services).
We also facilitate their use in proof of concepts or continuous integration by providing export in either Petals service assembly or Petals maven project.

Better and simpler edition of jbi.xml files
The jbi.xml are key files, which contain all necessary information to use a component as a service provider or consumer. Since its start, Petals Studio proposed a mixed editor, with a tab to edit flat source code, and another providing a graphical interface to fill in most used parameters.

This system has been enriched. To make it simpler for users, there are now two distinct editors, both are accessible through right-click menu. The graphical one now allows to configure almost all aspects of the jbi.xml file. A pure text editor is still available for experienced users. 

Integration of the official Eclipse BPEL designer
As an open source software editor, we always strive to share expertise and code. When we first released Petals Studio, it contained a self-made BPEL designer. This tool brought, at the time, more features and simpler interface than its open source alternatives.
Over time however, a similar project in Eclipse fondation grew up. Since some months, we have been sharing our own experience in this project, and contributing to its code.

Today, we bring to you the results of this synergy, by integrating this official Eclipse BPEL designer into Petals Studio. This means greats benefits for our users, as this project has a vibrant community around it, meaning an ever better bugfixing and development.

As always, we hope you will appreciate this release and keep our ears open for your feedback on our forum.

Petals team

More informations:
Illustrated overview of Petals Studio 1.3
Full Petals Studio 1.3 release notes
Download Petals Studio 1.3

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Greetings dear Petals users,
we are very glad to announce the public availability of our latest ESB, Petals ESB 4.0!
This distribution packs sweeties.

• Latest container with new kernel 3.2, which brings strong enhancements under the hood: beyond usual performance/stability profits, many parts have been rewritten to prepare for exciting new features (yeah, we're teasing you :)). Beware though, in spite of our care, there may be a few regressions, which we'll detect and fix as fast as we can.
• A new business monitoring system: no more Petals View+KPI, now all is based on plain texts logs, for extensive configurability and choice in third-party exploitation tool.
• A new Command Line Interface: now brings all essential administration tools in one dedicated shell, usable locally or remotely (including replacement for old "stop" and "shutdown" scripts).
• Pack of updates for most used components, to make them compatible with the new monitoring: Filetransfer, FTP, Mail, SFTP, SOAP, SQL, BPEL, EIP, JSR, Quartz, Validation, XSLT.
• BC-SOAP now supports WS-Security and SSL connexions.
• BC-Filetransfer is simpler to use as a service provider, and is now ready for high availability use-cases as a consumer.
• Petals startup script has been improved, using your feedback as guidelines.

Also, please note that package structure of the container and our versioning policy has slightly evolved. 

You're welcome to download Petals ESB 4.0 and try it at work... Or at home? For more information about an individual novelty, please refer to previous news on the blog.

We hope you'll enjoy Petals ESB 4.0, and are waiting for your feedback on Petals forum.

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As a platform for exchanging messages, Petals ESB needs monitoring capabilities. First, technical monitoring, to ensure the behaviour of the bus with load increase. Then, a way to know whatever happened in the bus (what messages were exchanged, what services were invoked, etc).

We provided dedicated tools to fulfill these needs. Thanks to your feedbacks, we've been able to define what to keep, and what to improve, to give you better tools.

As such, major changes are coming in these fields, from Petals 4.0 onwards.

Technical monitoring

The first mission has been fulfilled by the Petals Webconsole since a few years, with a nice GUI and administration/testing features (start/stop components, run mockup services, monitor performances...).

However, this tool was mainly built to help developers setting up their project, and wasn't always fit for a production environment.

Hence, we're currently improving the built-in SNMP probes existing in Petals. This will allow fine-grained, tailored technical monitoring with the use of tools such as Nagios or Cacti.

Messages monitoring

Being able to monitor the messages flows and their content is the first step towards a high-level business monitoring. So far, this was realized with Petals View, a dedicated GUI combined with a notifications component. While this worked fine ;), several users requested a more flexible solution. So, we're currently building a new system based on text logs. The first step will be Petals 4.0, in which logs will contain all necessary information to retrace a message flow.

Meanwhile, we are considering several options for logs exploitation, from logs aggregators to dedicated reporting tools, or API for everyone to build their own application upon.

We'll be eager to get your opinion and needs on this topic, when you get to see the first results with Petals 4.0!

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Hi all!

some of you have had a hint on what would be in next release of Petals ESB. Apart from bringing a new business monitoring system, the new vintage of Petals will mirror the great efforts accomplished in 2011 in enhancing our tests batteries and cross-integration evaluation.

Another point that was simple to improve, thanks to the feedback of our users, was the way to get hands on Petals and getting the hand of it.

So far, we waited for the core of Petals ESB (the "container") to come to a new release, and we published it altogether with any and all components that were improved during the same time. We called this container "Petals ESB x.x.x", numbering it after the version number of the container. Then, each user had to download this so-called "Petals ESB" and any other component separately.

This had some advantages, but also some drawbacks.

• "Tunneling effect": some components with great improvments could be released earlier for better user benefit.
• Confusion about what actually IS Petals ESB get: what we called the ESB was actually its core, or skeleton, but it wasn't very useful before you take some components to use with it.
• Difficulty of "assembling" your dream team: thanks to our great variety of components, each one having its own roadmap and lifecycle, it could be difficult at times for newcomers to pick up the best component version for a given container.

Things will change with Petals ESB 4.0.

• Container version number and distribution number will be decorrelated.
• Each component will be released following its own lifecycle, without waiting for the others.
• Once or twice a year, we'll publish a package comprising the container and a set of recommanded components to use with it, and this is what we'll now call Petals ESB.
• For expert users, each component and container will still be downloadable separately in any version.

So, in short:

These changes have been decided to make your life easier. We strongly apologize for the confusion it may cause during the transition period.

Yours sincerely,

Petals Team

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BC-SOAP component has been updated. Beyond a bugfix, this 4.0.9 release brings the support for HTTPS communication.

Changelog

• (Bugfix)[PETALSBCSOAP-100] - Component needing Saxon does not work correctly if BC SOAP is already starte.
• (New feature) [PETALSBCSOAP-62] - HTTPS support.

Download Petals BC-SOAP 4.0.9.

Cheers,

Petals team

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You are right, I need to smile more, be less tired and have a demo of the BPM editor working on low resolution displays… BTW, the demo of the DSB Monitoring & Management console used to deploy and monitor BPEL process works.

I let some traces in this article (as an example and for me, for later).
Notice that the apply command did not work with EGit, I had to use the command line. I guess it will be fixed in a future version.

• First, we need a patch, given as a diff file, e.g. in a bug entry.
• As a committer, you should apply and check this patch. So, you first need to copy the patch in your (cloned) Git repository.
• Get some stats about the patch :

  git apply --stat myPatchFile

• Make sure the patch can be applied :

  git apply --check myPatchFile

• Apply the patch :

  git apply myPatchFile

• Delete the patch file.

Then, you can check that the patch works and then commit it, before pushing the modification.
One important thing is to keep the author’s name in the commit. The author and the committer are different. And both can be kept in the commit and in the history. Here is an example in the command line:

git commit -a --author="authorUsername <author.mail.address@sth.com>"

After the push, both the author and commiter names will appear in the repository.

I don’t know if everyone in Eclipse projects uses this feature, but from the community perspective, this is very interesting (IMO).