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Business process orchestration round up

Where business process's are defined in a SOA then the sharing of data and injection of business process messages into those services using a notation for doing so makes sense. In 2003 IBM and Microsoft created BPEL4WSL or BEPL for short, this was submitted to OASIS for standardization. BPEL is supported in BEAs and Oracles products, JBoss have their own notation and BEA has submitted a JSR to add BEPL support to Java. In the .NET world Windows Work Flow foundation has a BPEL extender which could then be rigged to a PO\WS or WCF\WS. For anyone interested in BEPL\SOA in the Microsoft world then John Evdemons blog is worth keeping track of, I'd also recommend Sam's blog as someone who is in the field with this (he also has great posts on using Agile on his team).

Posted: Feb 06 2007, 10:45 PM by andrewstopford | with 1 comment(s)
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Fred Holahan said:

Andrew,

The original BPEL4WS 1.0 spec was published late in the summer of 2002 by IBM, Microsoft and BEA.  At the same time, IBM, Microsoft and BEA also published the WS-Transaction and WS-Coordination specs, although BPEL was the one that gained immediate traction.

The BPEL3WS 1.1 spec added SAP and Siebel as co-authors, and was published in May 2003.  The 1.1 spec was also submitted to OASIS in May 2003.

BPEL4WS 1.0 was largely a composite of two prior vendor specifications - IBM's WSFL (Web Services Flow Language) and Microsoft's XLANG.  The maturity of those predecessor specs, combined with the weighty backing of three industry giants (IBM, Microsoft and SAP), attracted a formidible ecosystem of contributors to OASIS once the WS-BPEL standards initiative was launched.

ALthough WS-BPEL 2.0 has the inevitable detractors (don't all successful standards?), it is a rich SOA orchestration standard that enjoys widespread support.  For those new to BPEL, Active Endpoints (http://www.active-endpoints.com) provides the open source ActiveBPEL Engine and the free ActiveBPEL Designer authoring tool.

Fred

# February 7, 2007 4:30 AM