SOA and Alfresco

[armandanesh]

Dear All

I am a new user of Alfresco and have two questions about Alfresco Advanced Workflow and hope that get an appropriate response.

Actually, I  am looking for a BPMS and read "Alfresco Advanced Workflow WIKI" and other documents in this regard. As I understood, Alfresco uses   jBPM in itself only to promote its Content Management capabilities. Therefore,  if I only want to have a BPMS, I should leave out alfresco and switch to jBPM. However,  alfresco provides some facilities that simplifies developing of workflow-based applications specially if they are content-based. In this case, I should design the workflows of application with jPDL and  in order to implement the workflows, I consider Alfresco as a big library and use its API to utilize its content management facilities. Then, I deploy the workflows in Alfresco and workflows are executed.
My first question is whether this viewpoint is correct or wrong.

My second question is whether alfresco supports Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). It is possible to develop SOA applications with jBPM because it supports BPEL. So it seems that Alfresco will also support BPEL. But I could not find any document in this regard. It is important for me that workflows are implemented as web services. These web services can also use the source code of Alfresco.

Thanks for your help,
Arman

[dhalupa]

Maybe this article could be of some help to you

http://ecmarchitect.com/images/articles/alfresco-workflow/advanced-workflow-article.pdf

Kind regards,

Denis

[armandanesh]

Dear Denis

Thank you for your reply but I could not find anything about supporting of BPEL in Alfresco. I just want to that if I define a prcess with BPEL, is it possible to deploy it in Alfresco?

Thanks,
Arman

[davidc]

We haven't yet embedded jbpm's support bpel into the Alfresco server, so it's not possible to deploy bpel processes (at least out-of-the-box).

However, I don't see why it's not possible to include jbpm-bpel into Alfresco's stack.

You'll also find that Alfresco exposes most of it's services via WSDL, so you can integrate Alfresco into any stand-alone bpel workflow server.