BPEL stands for Business Process Execution Language, an XML language for orchestrating Web services. It helps developing executable business processes on top of Web services based SOA. It is a defacto standard, published by OASIS.
BPEL stands for Web Services Business Process Execution Language, an XML language for orchestrating Web services. It helps developing executable business processes on top of Web services based SOAs. It is a defacto standard, published by OASIS. It is currently available in revision 2.0. The language bases on WSDL 1.1 and XPath 1.0.
Versions:
- v1.0 - BPEL4WS -2002
- v1.1 – 2003
v2.0 – Draft - WSBPEL – OASIS
(Some issues discussed):- How to use XPath
- Whether there should be sub-processes in BPEL
- How abstract processes should be used
BPEL allows to write processes definitions that can be deployed on a BPEL engine. A process describes the control- and data-flow between activities that perform tasks such as basic computations or Web service invocation in a block-structured manner.
WHERE?
- When an organization has a set of well defined, standardized processes & policies, BPEL can be used rather easily.
- When we need many web services to coordinate to carry out a complex business task
- When we need a standardized way of modeling biz processes
- When we need REST support in coordinated web services (because web services are stateless)
- When the activities in a process only need to send, receive, or transform XML data.
Benefits of BPEL:
- Industry standard language for expressing business processes
- Leverage a common skill set and language
- Designed to fit naturally into the Web services stack
- Expressed entirely in XML
- Uses and extends WSDL 1.1
- Uses XML Schema 1.0 for the data model
- Portable across platform and vendor
- Will run on any BPEL-compliant engine
- Interoperable between interacting processes
- Layering on top of Web services stack
Example of a BPEL process:
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