WS-BPEL 2.0 Becomes an OASIS Standard

Posted by Stefan Tilkov on Apr 12, 2007

Sections

Architecture & Design,

Enterprise Architecture

Topics

SOA ,

Orchestration ,

Web Services ,

Workflow / BPM

Tags

BPEL ,

Standardization

After nearly four years, WS-BPEL 2.0, the Web Services Business Process Execution Language, has become an approved OASIS standard.

WS-BPEL is a language for specifying business process behavior and exclusively relies on Web services. It supports two different kinds of processes: executable business processes, which can be executed by a BPEL engine such as Oracle BPEL Process Manager, IBM’s WebSphere Process Server, ActiveBPEL, Apache Ode, and others; and abstract business processes that are not intended to be executed and specify some agreed behavior that parties in a communication scenario can agree upon. Microsoft also supports BPEL, although mostly as an add-on for interoperability reasons (see more on this in this InfoQ news item).

WS-BPEL 2.0 is the sucessor to BPEL4WS 1.1, which in turn was created based on IBM’s WSFL and Microsoft’s XLANG. To some degree, WS-BPEL competes with the choreography specification currently being standardized at W3C, the WS-CDL (Web Services Choreography Description language), currently in candidate recommendation status.

The OASIS WS-BPEL wiki has some information on what is new in version 2.0. More information is also available in the official press release and on the BPEL TC part of the OASIS web site.

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   Are there any tools to support the BPEL graphical design and execution?

   by Yu Yan

   Both FOSS or Commercial one for trial usage are OK.
   I'm looking for a tool to implement a BPM/Workflow project.
   
   Thanks.

   Reply

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   Re: Are there any tools to support the BPEL graphical design and execution?

   by Mark Little

   There's an eclipse project.

   Reply

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   Re: Are there any tools to support the BPEL graphical design and execution?

   by Gopalan Suresh Raj

   You could use the NetBeans Enterprise Pack that comes with:
   
   * Graphical BPEL Editor - Visually authoring Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) processes to orchestrate partner Web services, such as Java EE 5 services.
   
   * Graphical WSDL Editor - Allowing the creation of WSDL documents with simple drag-and-drop functionality using the palette and a graphical canvas.
   
   * Graphical XSD Editor - Authoring, analyzing, and visualizing XML Schema and WSDL, including support for large, real-world, multi-file XML Schemas; authoring assistance for XML instance documents
   
   * Graphical XSLT Editor - Visually editing data transformations. The Mapper view has a source document panel, a target document panel, and a transformations panel. The Source view shows the XML source of the XSLT document being edited.
   
   * Composite Application Editor - Editing the deployment configuration of a Composite Application. The editable configuration parameters include a list of Service Units in the deployment package. Support for common editing scenarios, such as adding and modifying concrete WSDL elements, adding and removing service connections between Service Units, and connecting to endpoints of external Service Units is provided.
   
   There are also a whole slew of other features in there. For more information, Visit:
   enterprise.netbeans.org/
   
   Cheers
   Gopalan
   blogs.sun.com/gopalan

   Reply

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   Re: Are there any tools to support the BPEL graphical design and execution?

   by Gopalan Suresh Raj

   Also see the Workflow service engine that is part of the OpenESB project at www.glassfishwiki.org/jbiwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Wor...
   
   Also on the same page see a sample Purchase order demo.
   www.glassfishwiki.org/jbiwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Pur...
   
   This is all part of the open source project called OpenESB. For more information visit:
   open-esb.org
   
   Cheers
   Gopalan
   blogs.sun.com/gopalan

   Reply

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   Re: Are there any tools to support the BPEL graphical design and execution?

   by Tanguy Crusson

   You should be looking at a graphical designer that supports BPMN - the Business Process Modeling Notation. BPMN - now part of the OMG - provides a standard graphical notation for business processes, and a mapping to an execution language such as BPEL. BPMN is higher level than BPEL, in particular it supports multiple process participants (swimlanes) and can generate BPEL for each participant.
   
   You can have a look at Intalio (www.intalio.com), they acquired FiveSight and provide an full stack:
   - BPMN Designer running in Eclipse
   - BPEL engine running on Geronimo
   Both products were donated as open source: the designer to Eclipse, and the engine to Apache (ODE project).
   
   Here's a whitepaper for an introduction to the BPM concepts (BPEL, BPMN, XPDL) and a comparison of the open source stacks:
   www.glintech.com/downloads/BPM%20Essentials%20w...

   Reply

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