The lost BPM links

Towards the end of last year I came across an entry for business process management in Wikipedia. It wasn’t very good so, in the true spirit of Wikipedia, I rewrote it and tried to get some structure in it. Since then it has evolved with many people each making different contributions, although the original structure seems to have remained. Although I do have a few gripes with the current version of the entry, I guess I have to bow to the fact that my POV is not necessarily the POV of everybody else.

One section I added was a set of links to vendors currently offering BPM products. This has recently be removed by another Wikipedian with the comment that “it’s not a web directory”. Well, maybe. I have to admit that the section was troublesome in that everybody wanted to add their favorite vendor, even if their products had nothing to do with BPM. But I still found the section useful. However, rather than lamenting its demise, I have moved it here so what follows is the last link list from Wikipedia (edited to remove a number of spurious entries):

• Action Technologies


• Adeptia


• ADONIS


• Apache Agila (Open Source)


• Appian Corporation


• BEA


• Cordys


• COSA BPM


• Chordiant


• Documentum


• Workflow.Cubes


• FileNet


• FlowCentric


• Fuego


• Fujitsu
  
• HandySoft


• IBM


• IDS Scheer AG


• Intalio


• JBoss jBPM(Open Source)


• jCOM1


• K2.net Enterprise Workflow


• Lombardi


• Metastorm


• Microsoft


• Newgen Software


• Open Text


• OpenWFE (Open Source)


• Oracle


• Pegasystems


• Pikos' Bonapart


• SAP NetWeaver


• Savvion


• Sun / SeeBeyond


• Skelta Workflow Software


• TIBCO


• Ultimus


• Virtuoso Universal Server


• Vitria


• webMethods

My criteria for selection are rather loose, basically that each vendor states on their web site that they support business process management rather than just supporting particular processes (such as CRM , SCM etc.). The list is, of course, incomplete.

Rich Clients in a Browser - More about AJAX

I’ve been pretty busy over the last months (new project in another city) so this is my first post for a number of months.

However, since posting about AJAX and rich clients back in March a lot seems to be happening in trying to ease the burden of providing rich client functionally in a browser, i.e. people are creating JavaScript libraries. The following caught my eye:

script.aculo.us has a JavaScript library for creating user interfaces elements and functionality, such as drag and drop and auto-completing text fields.

Rico who as well as offering a number of visual effects also has a data grid which allows a HTML table to be connected to a data source.

Both of these are based on the Prototype framework which is a JavaScript framework which claims “to ease the development of dynamic web applications” and has functionality to ease the handling of XMLHttpRequest (one of the fundamental building blocks of AJAX).