Collaborate during Web services development

If you're serious about following a Service Oriented Architecture development model, you need to give your team tools that help assure a fluid collaboration from the creation and coding of business processes to the deployment and monitoring of Web Services-based applications. The folks at Active Endpoints Inc. in Waltham, Mass. think, of course, that they've got a single product that will cover all your SOA bases.

Alex Neihaus, vice president of marketing for the company, says Active VOS (for visual orchestration system) adheres strictly to Web Services standards, such as business process execution language (BPEL) and business process modeling notion (BPMN). He claims it lets business analysts use the BPMN standard approach they know to visualize a process on their screens and send over to IT for coding, where it appears in the BPEL format standard. A coder can make a change in his BPEL view and the business side will get a BPMN view.

Collaboration is easier, says Neihaus, when the different teams are seeing the application through their own standards' lens.

According to Mike Moniz, product manager, Active VOS is 100% compliant with the BPEL 1.1 and 2.0 standards and runs on almost any app server like JBoss or WebSphere. He says the BPMN module gives business analysts everything they need to model a business process from data flows and swim lanes to key performance indicators.

Active VOS 5.5 lets you turn "pojos" or plain old Java objects into live Web services. And when it ships in mid-August it will add support for complex event processing. Pricing starts at $10,000 for a production server and $4,000 for a development package.