Active Endpoints has announced that the ActiveBPEL Designer (formerly ActiveWebflow Professional) will now be available for free download from the Active Endpoints website as well as for free redistribution by other organizations.

ActiveBPEL Designer is a comprehensive Eclipse Ready BPEL authoring environment. The product includes extensive productivity features to speed developers through the BPEL design and testing cycle, including advanced visual controls, runtime simulation, integrated debugging and 100% standard BPEL code generation.

"We are very pleased to make the ActiveBPEL Designer freely available to the IT community," said Fred Holahan, Chairman and co-founder, Active Endpoints. "The ActiveBPEL Designer is often cited as the best BPEL design and test environment available today. By providing organizations with free and easy alternatives for acquiring, using and redistributing this world-class product, we aim to accelerate the adoption of BPEL."

ActiveBPEL Designer is an Eclipse Ready environment that includes the following key features:
• Process Visualization: intuitive, drag and drop diagram editing that allows users to rapidly construct process diagrams of any complexity. When process design is completed, users can perform visual runtime simulation and debugging, significantly reducing QA cycle times.
• High-productivity Instrumentation: high-productivity visual controls that provide easy access to the most common BPEL related resources. Users can quickly locate, register and use their WSDL resources; create reusable BPEL process artifacts (BPELets); and access a number of pluggable language environments for advanced data integration, mapping and transformation.
• Uncompromising BPEL Support: out-of-the-box support for any BPEL 1.1 processes. ActiveBPEL users can easily render diagrams by importing existing BPEL process definitions, and they can readily generate BPEL process definitions from any ActiveBPEL diagram. BPEL generated by ActiveBPEL can be executed by any BPEL 1.1 compliant engine.

"Our early successes with SOA have raised new opportunities and requirements, particularly in the area of BPEL-based, composite applications," said Asit Bhattacharya, Senior Software Engineer, Vodafone Plc. "We knew we had discovered a world-class BPEL authoring solution as soon as we began using the ActiveBPEL Designer. It fits right in to our Eclipse tooling framework and provides an exceptional level of development productivity. The process simulator alone was of significant value, saving us critical QA time as we bullet-proofed our applications."

ActiveBPEL Designer is freely available at the Active Endpoints website.