At the 5th of April I had a longer meeting at BEA in Birkerød with Frederik Frederiksen and Kenneth Skov. BEA had contacted me to hear and discuss my ideas about model driven development regarding business processes. We had some very good discussions, and I also got presented for BEAs development tools and Business Process Management systems. It really looked nice and promising. They have a development/execution/monitoring suite with is very comprehensive.

BEA has been coauthor of the BPEL standard, but they use the XPDL language for executable business processes. I have not looked at this language, but the strength of it should be that it explicitly can define human activities.

Developing business processes using BEAs tools involves, like for other providers, several people like a business analyst and a developer. They develop at the same model, which contains all information. Depending on the person developing, different detail levels can be exposed. The strengh of this approach, having only one model, is that inconsistens does not occur, and the business analyst and the developer allways have synchronised models. There are drawbacks of this approach, like the model created by the business analyst has been defined at the implementation level in XPDL, not at a higher platform independent level.

I presented my prototype tool and my ideas, and especially my idea of having domain specific elements was received positively. I think they got some ideas which they will work on.

It has been a while since I last wrote on my blog. The reson is that my family got a new (old) house in mid of February, an I have worked there in all sparetime and holidays. Now we have moved in (The house is still not finished). Pictures can be seen at my private homepage www.brahe.org.

In the end of last month I handed in my half year report to the PhD study board. The report explains my research and study activities the last half year and if there are any deviations from the plan. Until now I follow the plan and I am actually a little ahead of it.

The half year report can be found under the download section