Oracle BPM: A Big Pointless Mess?

When suggesting the use of an out of the box BPM product, most developers I know would object.

I've heard a few horror stories about Oracle BPM (previously known as Aqualogic BPM, and Fuego before that) which almost completely deterred me from trying it out.

In January 2008 I attended a training course on this technology, and left unconvinced. I couldn't figure out what situation could arise where this technology would make a good fit, considering its drawbacks (slightly ugly UI appearance, seemingly complicated acronyms, clunky and buggy developer IDE).

A few months passed, and I didn't hear much about BPM. Then I started work on a project which had a really tight timescale. It involved many different people who were all in different roles, and it had to link into a Sybase database to persist data and allow for full reporting and outgoing feeds.

I don't claim to be a Java expert (I'm anything but), so I needed something that'd do some of the work for me and save me plugging away at Java, JSP and CSS files, plus all the basic groundwork you need to do just to get a web application off the ground. Then someone took a deep breath, braced themselves for abuse and suggested 'Fuego'.

At first, I was completely opposed to using Fuego (which I quicly learned had been bought by Aqualogic, then in turn bought by Oracle). But I downloaded the Studio software and dug out the training manuals I had been given in the course in January.

It didn't take long to get up to speed with it, and with the new Eclipse based IDE, Oracle BPM became a little more convincing as the solution I was looking for. Given than I needed to develop something in a few weeks which managed user roles, complicated state transitions and persistence to Sybase, I decided to give it a go.

Two months down the line, the project has been deployed for user testing, we have a fully featured Sybase database which does almost everything we needed it to do, the user interface is ready (though a little clunky) and it handles roles and the necessary state transitions with ease. So far, the feedback from the customer has been excellent, and I'm now convinced that Oracle BPM is a worthy solution.

Though it needs some serious work in places. For example:

• The Eclipse based IDE is full of annoying little bugs. Nothing which stops you working or causes you to lose work, just irritiating things like not being able to change the font on more than one Presentation control at once.
  
• The documentation is nothing short of horrific. It looks like it was done as an afterthought by someone who was drunk after the post-release party.
• There aren't enough options for customising the UI in the WorkSpace if you use a shared instance for Production deployments.

Major though these problems sound, I wouldn't be too put off by them. If you were thinking of using Oracle BPM for your low-level, roles based project, then I'd recommend looking into it.

Unless you want to use it solely for workflow, with your own UI bolted on. In that case, leave well alone: there are better solutions out there.