Running into all sorts of old colleagues and friends. Seen others that I am going to have to flag down soon. Anyway on to Kenwood Tsai and Harish Rawat of EMC.

• Focusing on non-programming composite applications. They are going to focus on Email and “Restful and SOAP based Web Services” (A restful web service?)
• Talk about the Analyze, Deploy, Execute, and Monitor lifecycle of BPM. (This is good as a lot of developers don’t get exposed to the BPM lifecycle very much)
• Three core products ot build these apps in the back-end:
  • Process Builder
  • Process Engine
  • Process Integrator – old Business Process Services
• Composite Applications are apps that are put together from multiple services
• Glue-Code (old fashion integration) vs. Model Driven (Services etc.)
• (Very basic right now for me. fighting hard not to step out. Hoping for something useful or insightful soon).
• Can use process variables to store data about the process. They are process centric and don’t exist outside of the process. The “theory” is that the variables are from other systems or in documents and surfaced here for easy use and processing.
• Invoking Services – drag and drop
  • Configure the activity: includes rules from process data to configure the service call
  • Data mapping and transformation – can perform functions, XML transformation, support multi-value fields, and conditional nodes.
  • Supports JMS, SMTP, HTTP, SOAP, FTP/File, JDBC, Fax
• Demonstration:
  • Demo of creating a HTTP service to a Yahoo Service. (Not too difficult looking, but it will take practice. Only way to learn it is hands-on.)
  • D6.5 adds debugging and process parameters.
  • Showed creating a conditional test to determine what values are captured
  • Drag and drop mapping of values
• Receiving messages
  • Drag and drop
  • Service specific
  • Rules for copying the data over into the system
  • Asynchronous Interaction
  • Performs Correlation
    • Transport-based uses unique values to keep requests and responses together
    • Payload-based uses process specific information (PO Number)

(This all looks great. Nothing really new for me. My advice to people is to play with it. It will take more than days to deploy a new composite application, but it will still be faster than coding a new application.)

Time for lunch. Going to hit the exhibits next. You should be able to catch me near the Developer Lounge on the floor. My next session is probably going to be the D6.5 Architecture overview.

Disclaimer

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

All statements about the future of EMC products and strategy are subject to change due to a large variety of factors.