As the market for Business Process Management (BPM) matures, organizations implementing BPM solutions observe the proliferation of BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), WSDL (Web Services Description Language), and other forms of XML documents. Storing, finding, and using these documents is laborious and inefficient. BPEL Repository has several features that resolve these problems:

• an extensible framework that currently supports several standard XML files for BPEL, WSDL, and other XML schemas
• support for access to the stored XML data as Java™ objects, which makes it easier for Java programs to process the data
• ability to query the data using an object-oriented query language: Object Constraint Language (OCL)
• an Eclipse plug-in for visually interacting with and administering the repository of XML data.

How does it work?

BPEL Repository stores BPEL business processes and other related XML files in a file system. This technology has two parts: an Eclipse plug-in tool for administering the repository through a visual interface and a Java API that enables applications to access the repository.

The Java API is used to manipulate the files as EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) objects, hiding the data serialization and de-serialization from the user. BPEL Repository provides basic operations (create, read, write, and delete) for manipulating the data as objects. Although the user manipulates the data as objects, the data is stored as XML files compliant with the standard XML schemas for BPEL, WSDL, and so forth. BPEL Repository can easily be extended to support other XML schemas.

In addition, it is possible to query the XML files as EMF objects using an object-oriented query language: Object Constraint Language (OCL).

The OCL queries free developers from the burden of the underlying XML data model and allow them to concentrate on the object model of their application, which they usually know quite well. A major advantage of OCL over an XQuery is its ability to navigate through the data model and follow all the associations of an object model. In contrast, XQuery forces any application to formulate its query based on the tree structure of the underlying XML schema.

Jussi Vanhatalo works in the Business Integration Technologies group at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory. His current research interests combine the areas of Business Process Management, Service-Oriented Architecture, and Model Driven Architecture. He is pursuing his Ph.D. studies at the University of Stuttgart under supervision of Prof. Dr. Frank Leymann.

Mr. Vanhatalo has designed and implemented several plug-ins for IBM software products on the Eclipse platform. While working as a master thesis student at IBM Research in 2004, he designed and implemented BPEL Repository that was the topic of his master thesis. Mr. Vanhatalo received his Master's degrees from the Helsinki University of Technology and the University of Nice - Sophia Antipolis.