Today, Active Endpoints announced ActiveVOS 6.0, the world's most complete and open visual orchestration system. ActiveVOS 6.0 includes many new features, including BPMN modeling, enhanced BAM and BI reporting, the first integrated CEP engine, and of course, our famous BPEL capabilities.

The press release is here. Then watch a demo and download a free, supported, 30-day trial. Listen to the podcast in which our Sr. Director of Product Management talks about what we hoped to accomplish in ActiveVOS 6.0.

Packt is pleased to announce Service Oriented Architecture with Java, a new book which teaches the concepts and the implementation of using SOA with web services to design a sound architecture for business solutions.

Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a software architecture where functionality is grouped around business processes and packaged as interoperable services. SOA also describes IT infrastructure which allows different applications to exchange data with one another as they participate in business processes.

The Apache ODE (Orchestration Director Engine) team has announced this month its 1.2 release that includes many new features, improvements and bug fixes. Apache ODE is a WS-BPEL compliant web services orchestration engine allowing to orchestrate web services execution following a process description written in the BPEL XML grammar.

Inversion of Control (IoC) and Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) can be effective tools for implementing dynamic business workflows. In this article, the first in a two-part series, Bilal Siddiqui describes business workflows' dynamic nature and proposes a two-layer workflow model that lets you use XML to build configurable and flexible solutions.

... In fact, unit testing for BPEL-based applications doesn’t have to be harder than testing any other kind of program. If you take a few reasonable steps you’ll have the information you need to confidently revise and deploy your standards-based composite application using a test-first methodology.

A clear first step is to take the process offline. For example, if your application calls for a credit check, it may be impractical to send 10, 100, or 1,000 requests to the credit agency while you’re testing.