Eclipse BPEL Project

Just wanted to give a rundown of the Eclipse (Europa) BPEL Project and my impressions at the moment. The eclipse bpel project is located at:

Eclipse BPEL Project


Having experienced most of my BPEL development in either TextPad (BPEL 1.0) or in the Cape Clear Studio solution (BPEL 1.1), the Eclipse BPEL Project was not too difficult to slide into. Here are the highlights:

- BPEL Project is only focused on BPEL 2.0. No BPEL 1.1 at this time.
- Overall GUI is nicely organized and employs a very similar look and feel to the BPEL Editor in Cape Clear.




-Assignment Editor in the current release M3, does not provide a graphical drill down to the schema element level. You can select your messages but no further.




-Activities are easily selected and placed in the panel. The Properties window needs to be visible to then edit those value.
-No tab to edit the BPEL directly with context sensitive help. I opened the BPEL in an XML Editor and flipped between the windows.
-XPath is done manually rather than created via the selection tool.
-PartnerLink defintion process is not as easy as in Cape Clear but it does generate an artifact WSDL file that includes the partnerlink definition so you do not need to muck up your WSDLs with the elements.

Issues that I have experienced:

1) Currently the Web Service Tools that is bundled with the BPEL Project appears to have a bug with imported schema. This is obviously unrelated to the BPEL Project but the full-lifecycle of developing the Service Contract and using this for the BPEL is not working properly. Currently have to use inline schema instead of importing.

What I haven't tried:

1) Deploying generated BPEL 2.0 into a container. Will try Apache ODE in either Axis or ServiceMix to confirm execution.