Trying out the suite
After trying the tutorials a couple of times (the first two) I ended up mimicking the screencast, and then got it to work. From then on, the other tutorials are easy, but when I decided to make my own Business Process, something I thought would be simple, I didn’t turn out easy.
Since I worked on Amazon’s web services before, I know a fair deal about them, so the Business Process I decided to do would query Amazon for a parameter, and hopefully we would get an answer back, a piece of information related to the query.
The process would start out by asking the user for an ASIN, Amazon’s product code, and use their webservices to return the product’s corresponding name. In order to do that, you need two files, a wsdl (Web Services Description Language) and an xsd (XML Schema Definition) that I got from here. They produced some errors when imported into the Designer though, as indicated by the small red crossed box added on the icon.
Well, that didn’t turn out well, and after trying to get it to work, I realized my understanding was not sufficient to get it to work. Some of the errors were too arcane. So I installed 5.0 (beta), in case the imported files would be better supported, but still got many errors, so I gave up on just playing around with the software, and started reading a series of Reference Guides.
I also read an interesting article comparing the Scandinavian to the English ways of introducing SOA to the enterprise. It turns out that the Scandinavian – SOA-as-a-tactic way leads to quicker adoption and better understanding, than the English SOA-as-a-strategy, where SOA is adopted in one swoop.
This tailors well with the thinking that maybe Intalio should aim at getting their foot in the door – use the suite to solve something problematic but relatively small, letting the client develop their own expertise, and let BPM usage spread throughout the company.