Get Your BPMN Schema Today

In a recent article published by Intelligent Enterprise, my friend Bruce Silver laments that BPDM is essentially useless, and that the BPM industry badly needs an XML schema for BPMN. I could not agree more with him, and I am happy to report that Intalio recently donated such a schema to the Eclipse Foundation, complemented by a ridiculously-good-looking object model for it. Not only did we give the schema away for free, but we also donated a complete implementation for it.

BPDM, currently developed by the OMG, is presented by its promoters as a universal interchange format for business processes. In reality, it’s an utterly confusing metamodel that brings very little to the table, and is used by legacy workflow vendors as a way to fight against the upcoming dominance of the BPMN+BPEL standard combo. Workflow vendors like nothing more than to protect their respective little niches, and have done a phenomenal job over the past fifteen years of ensuring that no useful standard would ever be developed in the space.

Over time, smarter vendors grew tired of playing such games, and developed BPMN and BPEL. Unfortunately, a semantic gap exists between the two, and BPEL cannot be used as an interchange format for processes modeled in BPMN. Instead, an XML schema for BPMN is needed, and this is what Intalio has made available through the STP Project managed by the Eclipse Foundation.

This schema is focused on the semantics of process models, rather than the presentation of process diagrams. For the later, extensions can be developed by vendors, and the need to standardize them is not entirely clear. An interchange format for BPMN processes should focus on the process semantics, and this is what this schema does, in a very straightforward, unambiguous manner.

As anything developed by the Eclipse Foundation, this schema is “open-source”, in the sense that anyone can use it for free, as is or in a modified version. But because a schema is not of much use to most people, we also made sure to provide a complete implementation for it, in the form of a collection of plug-ins for the Eclipse development environment. The STP BPMN Modeler developed by Intalio is a complete implementation of the BPMN standard, built using Eclipse’s latest technologies, including an EMF object model bound to a graphical notation via the GMF project.

For business analysts, this modeler supports the development of standard BPMN process models. For developers, it allows the creation of BPMN diagrams, the generation of org.eclipse.stp.bpmn EMF objects that can be traversed, annotated, and transformed to generate BPEL or other process execution code, and the extension of the editor to support other application-specific usage.

So here we are — as of today, you have no excuses for not sharing your BPMN models.

“It’s always more fun to share with everyone.”