Gluecode Software Inc, who currently ships its own open source business process management (BPM) engine, has released code for an early version of BPM product to Apache Software Foundation (ASF), which has been accepted as an incubator project. ASF incubators are designed to gauge community interest before becoming full ASF projects.
Open source middleware specialist Gluecode believes the project, codenamed Agila, will provide ISVs a low-cost BPM alternative to more expensive BPM products delivered by companies like IBM, BEA Systems, Oracle and SAP.
Gluecode vice president of marketing Alice Chow called Agila the missing piece of the puzzle that put Jakarta on a functional parity with SAP, IBM and Oracle. Jakarta is ASF’s umbrella for a series of open source Java projects and includes the ubiquitous Tomcat Web server.
[Agila] is designed to be modular and embeddable. For ISVs, it’s an entry point, they can take modular pieces of the technology and build processes, Chow said.BPM has received increased interest during the last year, with the evolution of service oriented architectures (SOAs). BPM provides a means to automate services, and to coordinate and control services and levels of services between systems.
Gluecode plans its own upcoming BPM release based on the code, which adds a graphical process designer, drag-and-drop components, processes and controls, enterprise-class application clustering, and integration with Gluecode’s process software.
