Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is a non-proprietary, XML-based
language developed by a group of major vendors including IBM, BEA, and
Microsoft. Its function is to describe how Web Services interact with one
another to form workflow systems that implement business processes. As a
model and grammar for describing this behavior, it lets you implement complex
processes by creating and wiring together different activities such as
invoking a service, manipulating data, throwing faults, or terminating
processes. With BPEL you can take a structured top-down approach to
implementing a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).
The BPEL specification, like most first editions, is rather basic. While
extremely powerful and flexible, it also had to gain agreement from all of ... (more)