August 5, 2008

A lot of deserved attention goes to Lombardi’s Blueprint tool for innovating with GWT and bringing collaborative process modeling and sharing to the web. What I didn’t like about it was the BPDM export… that sucked. It basically meant Lombardi was the only run-time game in town. The other part that isn’t clear about Blueprint is that the model itself appears to have a proprietary structure, and thus isn’t exportable.

Another tool in the modeling world that I have been impressed with is Oryx. This is a research effort from the University of Potsdam in Germany. It appears to be using a JS library and runs pretty well on FF & IE. I think Blueprint has the edge on usability, but Oryx certainly has the edge in terms of process exportability to Petri Net Markup Language (PNML) along with model presentations in BPMN1.0/1.1, EPC, Petri Nets, Workflow Nets & FMC.

Sample of the Browser Editor:

Oryx in Action

It also leverages OpenID to quickly let you login, model & share processes with others. Plus, the code-base is hosted on GoogleCode and available under an MIT license. The killer aspect about Oryx though, is the extensions support. Researchers have already been working on extensions and a BPMN to BPEL4Chor one is released for review. This is the first time that I have seen a model that allows for multiple extensible modeling & execution representations through extensions. In theory, this makes Oryx ideal from a survivability & resiliency standpoint. In reality, these disparate modeling/execution “transcoders” are a difficult proposition.

The beauty of the platform is that it allows many talented people to attempt solving it for themselves or the community. Therefore, for the first time, the idea of sustainability is only a factor of one’s immediate environment and not some industry panel that fights over what BPMN2.0 should be or whether it’s worth it to adopt BPDM in the industry.

So, there’s my ode to Oryx. Keep up the good work!

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