Answers on the WWF vs BizTalk question

Published Fri, Sep 16 2005 8:48 AM

I questioned whether you would want to invest in BizTalk orchestrations if WWF is already around. Darren Jefford perfectly describes the fundamental differences between WWF and BizTalk. I think the two biggest arguments are that BizTalk acts as a reliable, scalable host to orchestrations and automatically persists the state while in WWF you need do both things yourself.

This proves that BizTalk has added value, even in the orchestration space. I still see situations in which the choice is tougher, but the majority of the orchestrations I build today, would probably be done in BTS anyway, even with WWF around. Which doesn't make WWF useless in any way. I can imagine applications that become very flexible because their abilities are exposed as WWF activities and tied together through WWF Workflows. That is very powerful stuff.

by Carlo Poli

Comments

# Erwyn van der Meer said on Friday, September 16, 2005 5:45 AM

According to the demoes I saw, WWF supports persisting long-running workflows to a store. It is much more flexible than BizTalk because you can plugin any store. A SQL provider is in the framework. This is called activation and passivation of workflows.

# Siddhartha Roy said on Sunday, September 18, 2005 2:39 PM

WWF is an API framework. Its a logical step forward to allow users \ ISVs to take WWF and do rehostable self contained workflow in applications. BizTalk will remain a server and provide all the benefits of a server. Future versions will build on WWF and be far richer. Usage scenarios are different.
BizTalk provides a robust service container with reliability, scale-up/out, admin, deployment, operational / business monitoring, tracing, persistence, perf and stress characteristic of enterprise servers. It should be obvious that building all of that is non-trivial and would be needed to be duplicated everytime if you wanted to use WWF where BizTalk is more appropriate.