Calling Java code or complex algorithms from BPEL is fairly easy (spoken like a true marketing person;). You can either,

1) Write your own XPath functions (in Java) for rules

or

2) Write your own Java web services and invoke them from processes

This follows the best practice to decouple complex rules or complex processing from the business process.

Let me know if you have any further questions. I would also encourage you to get some of these conversations going in our community forum at http://bpms.intalio.com.

Jonathan

About zero coding, I feel we should have some mechanism to write custom code if required. When we develop enterprise applications we may need to call some existing Java codes or may be some complex algorithms are part of the work flow. How do we going to handle this?

Sorry it took so long to reply to this post, but hopefully I can clarify some things.

When we talk about zero code we are talking about two things, our drag and drop interface and the fact that you can take the design you draw in BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation a standard owned by OMG) using our modeling tool and automatically turn it into code (BPEL, or Business Process Execution Language) which runs on our Intalio|Server. Our designer includes the ability to import WSDLs and use our mapping tool to drag and drop services to tasks. You can even perform transformation functions, for example to concatenate first and last name. So there is a lot of flexibility in what you can build without actually writing lines of code. Could you code the BPMN and BPEL by hand? Sure if you really want to. But the purpose of our product is to make that unnecessary. And it isn’t about building a java snippet as Dan suggests, but using the visual editor to build BPMN and BPEL code needed for a business process.

As for the source code, we are working on an update to our website which will hopefully help.

But, for now I put up an article on our FAQ to address where to find the source code. You can find it at the following link: http://bpms.intalio.com/faq/display-2.html#FAQ36

Thanks,
Jonathan Crow
Intalio

‘Zero Coding’ sounds like a great answer until you realize that it’s either implemented as ‘zero features involving zero deviation from the golden path’ or it’s ‘One million mouse clicks to freedom’.

-dan