Heads down for BPELPM 10.1.3 - nightly impressions ..

While playing with my nigthly 10.1.3 build from yesterday (we moved into heads down mode!), I noticed not only one, but 100's of little and big improvements for usability, easier development and of course a lot of new, cool features. Here is an excerpt (gathered on a caltrain ride from and to the office :-D)..

Important note:
As the following impressions have been gathered from a nightly build, I don't add screenshots, as the layout, or icons might change a little as of the ongoing development/QA process.

After installation - and reconfiguration to point to my Oracle XE DB (howto is here) - I was keen to see play with the new BPEL Designer, itnegrated in our JDeveloper 10.1.3 - and wow!

• Choose elements for input / output variables at creation of process,
  no more choosing, or modification afterwards needed - to change them (of course, you can still do it as you were used to)
  


• Tooltips on each activity - reveice, invoke - now expose information
  on the operation invoked/received and the type (request/response, fire and forget ..)
  


• Application navigator - logical gouping
  - schemas
  - sensors
  - testsuites
  - one subgroup for each Partnerlink, that can be expanded to show the wsdl/schema defintions for it (In/Out-put header, ..)
  


• Awesome look and feel of the modeler, as of the new IDE Framework,
  have you looked at JDeveloper 10.1.3 yet? (if not, here is the link), to get an impression of the greatly improved overall look and feel
  


• Automatic hints in modeler on activities (such as not initialized variables)
  


• Build / deploy using obant, automatic creation of local deploy and remote deploy targets, part of bpelc task now
  


• New, improved (reorder of) component palette
  - BPEL Activities (religously BPEL spec'ed ones)
  - Adapter Service (all the adapters we provide out of the box, typed)
  - BPEL Extensions (Decision Service, Transform, receive signals)
  - Notifications (Email, Pager, Fax, SMS, Voice)
  


• New human workflow, far more choices - improved usability
  strict seperation of task and routing slip
  


• Assign offers you direct choice of what you want to do ..
  - copy rule, append rule, remove rule
  

After creating my little process, and deploying it to my server (right click on build.xml and choose run default target), click click click
I find myself back in the bpel console.

More impressions, console..

• BPEL Domain users/ and the admin are now jaas based; Each domain will have a group assigned, so more users for each domain are possible, allows access tracking - and of course integration into the container based Identity Mgmt (jazn/oid/..)
  


• After running your process, click on tests and save your inputs for running as testcase / or integration test
  

This is just a little excerpt of things, that I've noticed while testing, more impressions to come soon, while Meera, our Adapter PM, is preparing a big list of new features, more detailed.. If you are interested in specific features check out our previews on the BPEL PM webinar site and register for the upcoming 10.1.3 preview one.

Time to watch out for big news on OTN's SOA Center soon.

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