Business Process Execution Language

I have been thinking and writing about workflows and how they can be used in each and every business process of yours. And suddenly I noted Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). I remember to have seen it about a year back but did not focus on it more so because in my previous job, I never needed it.

BPEL was proposed by IBM and BEA. With Microsoft joining the bandwagon of interoperability, BPELJ was introduced as it aims to fill certain holes in the original language.

BPEL (also known as BPEL for Web Services, WPEL4WS) is an XML-based language (similar to SOAP) to standardize business processes in a distributed environment. Similar to SOAP (read: Web Services), it paves way for interoperability. However, instead of being simple functions in Web Services, it is more process oriented.

BPEL provides semantics for specifying business process behavior based on Web Services. A BPEL4WS process is defined in terms of its interactions with partners. A partner may provide services to the process, require services from the process, or participate in a two-way interaction with the process. Thus BPEL orchestrates Web Services by specifying the order in which it is meaningful to call a collection of services, and assigns responsibilities for each of the services to partners. You can use it to specify both the public interfaces for the partners and the description of the executable process. Original Reference

I am doing more study of BPEL, W/F, Business Process Orchestration (BPO) and the related. You can expect some more writing on it pretty soon.

Ah! Didn't you see the date/time of posting? It's Sunday evening and what am I doing on the laptop? Shouldn't I be enjoying at the mall?