I'm new to BPEL/BPMN.
Is it possible to write a BPEL/BPMN aware software without WS-* web services and EJB Container such as jBoss, WebLogic, Glassfish?
I want to know if there are quickstart tutorials on creating BPEL/BPMN programs with Maven and Eclipse.
And, do open engines like Apache ODE and jBPM provide WYSIWYG workflow designer to end users behind browser?
BPEL itself is depending on WS-, so if you want to use standard BPEL, you cannot avoid Web Services. BPMN 2.0 however provides an abstraction, which means you can use BPMN with WS-, Java or whatever you want as long as your engine supports that. Activiti for instance is bad in WS-* but quite good when you want to embed it into your Java app.
The Eclipse BPEL designer has a deployment descriptor editor and deployer for Apache ODE and JBoss Riftsaw, the latter is basically ODE with some JBoss foo.
you can no doubt create clients that connect to a BPEL engine yet don't run within an application server. They will however need WS-* because that's the mechanism to communicate with BPEL processes.
For tutorials, see the websites of the various vendors of BPEL related tools and servers. jBoss I think has a plugin for Eclipse to provide a workflow editor, I don't know about Apache.
