Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Intro to WS-BPEL

Before we dive into some key aspects of the Enterprise Payment Bus, I like to share with you some more information on WS-BPEL.

The OASIS WS-BPEL Technical Committee approved the WS-BPEL 2.0 specification on 1/31/2007. The official Committee Spec Release Candidate can be download from http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/22036/wsbpel-specification-draft%20candidate%20CD%20Jan%2025%2007.pdf.
An interesting article about the Goals of the WS_BPEL 2.0 specification can be found at http://xml.coverpages.org/BPEL4WS-DesignGoals.pdf


WS-BPEL 2.0 is a major component of the Enterprise Payment Bus:

  • WS-BPEL is build on compatible Web services standards

  • WS-BPEL is an XML based language

  • WS-BPEL will be used to define the Payment Business Processes that interact with external Payment System entities through Web service operations

  • WS-BPEL will be used to define a set of Web service orchestration concepts for the Payment work flow that are meant to be used in common by both the external (abstract) and internal(executable) views of a payment business process.

  • WS-BPEL will be used to define a long-running Payment transaction model that is based on proven techniques like compensation actions and scoping to support failure recovery for parts of the long-running Payment business process.

IBM EPP - Competition to EPB ?

IBM released its Enterprise Payments Platform in December 2006. To review the IBM press release you can click on this link: IBM EPP Press Release.

Is this EPP a close competitor to the EPB ? I believe it very much is. It
is an IBM product suite that enables financial institutions to rapidly develop and deploy payment applications across a WebSphere infrastructure. The backbone of the EPB is an ISO20022 XML message that allows for easy transformation and routing. Orchestration, Transaction Status Updates and Monitoring are key components of both Microsoft's EPP and the Open Source EPB project.
One key differentiator is that the EPB will be available as an Open Source Initiative.

During the current design phase I encourage all payment professionals to provide their input in the definition of a complete Payment Work Flow with all its interactions towards other auxiliary and Payment systems.
In the next couple of Blog Post, I will share with you my current definition of a Payment Work Flow defined in WS-BPEL XML and encourage everybody to comment on this project.


Digg!

What is an EPB ?

EPB = Enterprise Payment Bus

The Enterprise Payment Bus is based on the concept of an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus)

The term Enterprise Service Bus was coined by Gartner to define a new type of application integration middleware that is intended to act as a lightweight, ubiquitous integration backbone through which software services and application components flow (Source : Roy Schulte, Gartner)

The Payment Work flow as it exists at Financial Institutions is an excellent process to apply to the ESB concept. Different ESB's are currently commercially available (Sonic,Oracle, BEA,...) For this open source project, however I selected another open source technology : Mule. You can find more information about Mule at their project website




Digg!

Welcome to the Enterprise Payment Bus - Open Source Project

Welcome Payment Professional,

I start this blog to inform you about new progress in an exciting project that I have been working on since the summer of 2005. Using new technologies like Mule, WS-BPEL and a new standard XML format ISO20022 I created a new payment workflow which I called the "Enterprise Payment Bus". The idea to create an ESB like payment workflow started from conversations with Ivan Mitrovic and myself . In the last 2 years I have worked independently on this project which tries to describe a full payment process written in BPEL based on a ISO20022 XML message

I encourage every Payment Professional to participate and provide your feedback to this open source project.