Add support in Intalio|BPP to help customers transitioning from BEA Weblogic Integration (WLI) which is being phased out by Oracle.

Two candidate features to consider:

1. BEA WLI Control Connector.
   Adapt existing Axis2 utilities and integrate them with Intalio|BPP such that BEA WLI customers can continue to invoke business logic and connectors encapsulated in the WLI controls from within Intalio business processes.


2. BPEL Import.
   Add support in Intalio|Designer so that customers have the option to export business process definition using WLI's BPEL export utility and then import the BPEL into Intalio|Designer. Please see here for a use case involving migrating from IBM Websphere Business Integration Server.

Other features to be discussed and determined based on demand.

Hello,

Here is an actual use case for BEA Weblogic Integration (WLI) migration support.

Oracle has decided to phase out BEA WLI after the acquisition. One of our customers is adopting the following strategy as they transition from BEA WLI to Intalio|BPP.

1. Reuse WLI controls.
   
   BEA WLI abstracts business logic and connectivity to external systems behind controls which are abased on Apache Beehive. The customer has a collection of controls implemented over the years, and wants to leverage the investment in the Intalio environment.
   
   Fortunately, these WLI controls are essentially Java objects (POJO). Leveraging existing Axis2 utilities, they turn these POJOs into Java web services and they can easily import the associated WSDLs into Intalio|Designer.


2. Leave existing business process definition and instance data in place.
   
   BEA WLI ships with a BPEL export utility. In principle, the customer could choose to export their business process models into BPEL and then import the BPEL into Intalio|Designer to continue to improve and evolve the business processes if Intalio|Designer supported BPEL import.
   
   BEA's BPEL export utility has the following disclaimer:
   
   "...While the main orchestration logic of the JPD is exported to BPEL, it is not expected that the exported BPEL will be immediately executable in the target environment. You will need to manipulate the BPEL in the target environment to get the exported process to run, or to get close to the run-time semantics. This is due to the fact that some executable call-outs from the JPDs will be opaque to the exported BPEL code. These executable units generally include controls, code written in perform nodes, and XQuery transformations. The BPEL Export tool copies the Java code and the XQuery code as extension nodes in BPEL. As a result, you must re-implement the logic in the target BPEL environment, since JPD provides a superset of the functionality provided by BPEL..."
   
   The customer's concern is that it would require too much effort to fix up the exported business processes as they have close to 200 models representing over 30 man-months of effort.

For now, the customer decides to develop new business processes in Intalio|BPP. By turning WLI controls into web services, they can reuse existing business logic and connect to running backend systems. All business processes in the BEA WLI environment will continue to run as-is.

Feedback and suggestions are welcome!

Shao.