Tomorrow Comes Today

It took some weeks until I finally recieved the thesis of S. Perkles about Server-side XForms processing. Well, it deals not only about XForms but about building a XForm based frontend for BPEL processes. So I realized that “a Web service’s WSDL document provides all the information needed for creating an XForms based front end to the BPEL process” (Ch. 5.2.2). That’s right but was a new perspective for me.

Within the instance data of the XForm all data elements are included - and structured what is the idea of XForms. So after the validation the instance data could be mapped to a SOAP call, which finally invokes the BPEL process engine. All we need is a connector between the XForms processor and the BPEL engine, which maps the instance data of the XForm to SOAP.
But Perkles goes one step further. Since the WSDL document includes all definitions of the interaction and also references XML shemas for details and type definitions, all XForm-relevant information is actually given here. In consequence it is possible to generate the XForm or even to build a generic XForm, which represents the GUI part of any WSDL document. - A quite impressive idea. Actually I thought something more between the WSDL and the user frontend would be needed.

How that could be done is explained in the thesis. And because it sounds like theory I like to mention the sixth chapter, which presents a case study of an implementation using BPWW4J from IBM. I am curious if I am able to go through this.

Reference: Server-side XForms Processing - A Browser-independent Implemantation of the Next Generation Web Forms by Siegfried Perkles, 2003, TU Vienna

Another article: Send Part of an XForms Instance to a Web Service by developerWorks

Sie lassen sich ja immer eine ganze Weile Zeit für Ihre Platten - aber jetzt sind sie wieder da! Als ich ein Poster irgendwo in Berlin auf der Straße gesehen habe, bin ich quasi sofort in den nächsten Plattenladen gerannt. Ich hab zwar drei verschiedene durchsuchen müssen, aber letztlich habe ich die CD bekommen, um sie anschließend eineige Stunden über meine Kopfhörer zu genießen.

They always took their time and produced great records. Tool is back! - As I saw a poster on the street I instantly looked out for the next record store. It took me three different once till I got it. And afterwards some hours with headphones to enjoy it!

For everyone who likes to remember the long nights in the office while the web and it hype: here is what you missed all the time:

Taken from: laptops.engadget.com

For some weeks I am using RoundCube as webmail client - or to be serious I try to. Except of some problems with the character encoding (probably by stupidness) it is a really sexy clinet. But the primary effect in changing away from gmail was, that I am using my Apple mail client again. Not because that is the best solution. But there are some major features missing in RoundCude like rules or filters, a spam mail filter (gmail is still best in my experience) and a message search.

Hopefully these festures will come soon. At least they all are on the roadmap and on the top of the list.

As we are planning and prototyping a new technology for web based business applications at form4, I am constantly looking for future proof components for not only the use case but the business case view.

So I started with a little research abount workflow engines like jBPM and ended up with BPEL and some articles about this language. Well, one interesting aspect is the business process perspective and a second is the independence of the implementation technology.

For some reasons we focus on MDA by using UML for modelling and Java J2EE for the runtime and so I was looking for engines which are able to supply those languages: UML -> BPEL -> J2EE. So I found some insteresting articles: MagicDraw is going to support BPEL, jBPM announced an alpha release of a BPEL support and something about BPEL vs. Java writte by BEA and IBM.

But still open: the prototype. But I had some tries with jBPM - for my desperation not that successful as expected, but I will give it another try.