By bushman

Alex Boisvert, Intalio’s Product Development Director, presented an overview of the Intalio Server at Intalio JapanCon 2008.

Process Engine

Intalio uses Apache Ode as the BPEL engine. This is the leading BPEL engine. It uses only open standards, uses a fully transactional engine, and is embeddable. Processes are tied to memory. There are customers with 200,000+ processes running.

Ode is very scalable. It uses multi-threading and can be clustered. Clustering supports automatic failover. In a clustered environment the database is used as a system of reference. Only minimal node synchronization is required.

Performance depends on:

• Message bus
• Process design
• Process persistance
• Event persistance
• Hardware software configuration

Usually the database is the bottleneck. Intalio recommends the use of the best database possible to achieve best performance.

Typical server performance on standard server hardware.is 1 million transaction per day on a database persistant server. Non-persistant servers get 10 million transactions a day.

Process management is handled from the bpms console. On top of that there are process query and debug APIs. Process versioning is done as processes are deployed. By default the new version of a process replaces an older version. It is also possible to have custom versioning by using the server API, to control process lifecycle.
Human Workflow

The workflow components are a set of components that allow you to define your own workflow rules. There are many choices for user interace creation including XForms (Orbeon), TIBCO GI, Ruby etc.

The available task types for workflow are;

• Initiate Process
• People Task
• Notifications

Provides a full security framework, providing typically AAA functionality, by default the security framework is integrated with LDAP.
Server Roadmap and Research

Intalio currently has many features in development. Here are a few:
Simple BPEL - simPEL

Simple BPEL provide an alternative to using visual design tools. It has a simpler syntax. Developers do not need to create BPEL directly. SimpEL is a scripting dialog of BPEL, programmer friendly with a syntax similar to JavaScript. You can mix SimPEL with Java, PHP, Ruby etc.

You could generate BPMN diagrams from SimPEL.

RESTful BPEL

Provides a simpler method of using web services, such as those provided by Amazon, google, salesforce.com etc. Provides the ability to exposing processes as resources.

TAS3

Trsusted Architecture for shared secuirty, a European Union project on how to deal with trust and secuirty, details are available at www.tas3.eu

Feeds

Adding support for BPEL to distribute data on an internet-scale.

Native XQuery Support

Providing a more powerful data manuiplation lanaguge.

Publish-Subscribe

Popular architecture for event distribution, decouple publishers from consumers.

Singleshot

Experimental task manager for process managemen, being developed in Ruby on rails.

Other blog articles in this series:

• Intalio JapanCon 2008: Introducing BPP
• Intalio JapanCon 2008: Henry Peyret - Forrester
  
• Intalio JapanCon 2008: BAM Presentation
• Intalio JapanCon 2008: Liferay Portal
• Intalio JapanCon 2008: Intalio Server Overview

October 6th, 2008