Active Endpoints, which has been best known as “the other company” that joined IBM, SAP, Oracle and BEA (oh heck, what’s the difference between them anymore?) as co-author of the BPEL4People proposed spec, is now introducing a visual BPEL orchestration product that it hopes will put it on the map.

The product, called Visual Orchestration System (VOS), provides a lifecycle tool for developers to create, test, deploy, and repurpose or retire BPEL orchestrations.

At first blush, it looks like the visual workflow designers that the BPM crowd has offered for years. But the difference is that this is a BPEL tool, meaning that whatever you orchestrate is designed, not for modeling, but for execution. And, not too surprisingly, Active Endpoints claims that VOS is the first tool to support BPEL4People, a spec that’s only now being submitted to the web services standards body Oasis.

With VOS, you create specific orchestration projects, in the same way that a Java developer would create a Java project. You lay out the folders to hold the artifacts of a BPEL orchestration, including deployment descriptors, sample data, schema, test cases, and WSDL artifacts (specific web services) that are associated.

You then draw a workflow with each node defined by the service (which could be WSDL, REST, or a JMS service) and the operation, which you can choose with help of a wizard. When specifying the service, you indicate its location by entering its URI, and then the tool pulls out the relevant metadata that is required by BPEL.

With BPEL4People and WS-Human Task support, you can set a threshold that instructs the process when to send the operation to a person.

Once the BPEL orchestration is configured, you can simulate it and, like a code debugging tool, insert breakpoints to look at the results of each operation, whose state is displayed visually.

When it comes time to deployment, through a wizard, a wizard steps you through inputting the deployment descriptors that tell the system where the orchestration is to physically run, plus any policies that you wish to implement. Once deployed, you can suspend problematic portions of the orchestration, such as a stalled process that keeps looping, and perform remote debugging of services in production.

Active endpoints is planning to release the tool on March 1, at which time it promises to, in marketing VP Alex Neihaus’s words, “shatter previous pricing models.” (We didn't know that BPEL already had a pricing model.)

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