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.