BJ Grau

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 its many contributors, and so it lacks some important features that make it more practical. Here... (more)