Chapter Seven. The Workflow Management
Coalition (WfMC)
ALTHOUGH ITS
INFLUENCE HAS WANED IN RECENT YEARS
, the Workflow Management
Coalition (WfMC, http://www.wfmc.org) remains a rich source of
ideas about BPM. The contributions of this
group
include a
decade
-old workflow reference model and specifications for the
design of its main pieces, including a client API and an exportable
process definition format.
The WfMC, founded in 1993, is a
nonprofit
organization that
writes
workflow standards, including a workflow
reference model and specifications for each of its
core
interfaces:
XPDL, WAPI, and WfXML. The WfMC also produces voluminous BPM
literature; notably, the annual Workflow Handbook
(http://www.wfmc.org/information/
info
.html). The group is chaired
by Jon Pyke and has more than 300 member organizations, including
BEA, FileNet, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, NEC Soft, Oracle, Sun, TIBCO
(Staffware), Toshiba, Vignette, Vitria, and WebMethods.
This chapter highlights the core WfMC design
ideas. The first section examines the WfMC reference model. Next,
it explores XPDL, providing an extended example, a brief look at
the main elements, and a summary of its support for the P4
patterns. The
next
section examines the major functional elements
of the WAPI and provides an example. The chapter concludes with a
brief look at the WfXML.
|
In the fast-changing world of BPM, WfMC is an
older, more established group with mature ideas. With the
increasing popularity of the competing BPEL language (Chapter 5),
the WfMC must somehow justify its relevance. The trick is to not
compete
with BPEL but complement it, as the BPMI has done (Chapter
6) by
surrounding
BPEL in its proposed BPM stack with BPMN
(modeling notation) and soon-to-come specifications BPQL (query
language for process monitoring), BPSM (common process metamodel),
and BPXL (BPEL extensions). Significantly, the BPMI excludes its
own execution language BPML from the stack, accepting BPEL's reign
in that category. BPMI seems stronger and fresher than ever because
it is building key pieces of a platform that solution providers
will actually use.
WfMC's predicament is similar. Despite having a
good reference stack with substantial
implementations
of each the
major interfaces, one of those interfacesnamely, XPDLis a
competitor to BPEL. To be successful, the WfMC should drop XPDL
from the stack in favor of BPEL and then
demonstrate
the value of
the overall model and its non-XPDL interfaces. That model, whether
it includes XPDL or not, is full of good, current ideas. But
leaving XPDL in makes the WfMC seem as if it is working in a
vacumn, with an obscure process language that no one else is
using.
|
|
