BPEL

The more I think about software architecture and the new wave to SOA, the more I like the thought of graphically designing business processes and exposing them as Web Services. A big part of this now is the use of BPEL, or the Business Process Execution Language. The full name of the standard is actually BPEL4WS, but most folks are going with BPEL now.

If you've done any BizTalk work at all you'll be used to Orchestrations, which are BizTalk objects for process execution. An example from a BizTalk orchestration is below:



I'm doing some exploratory work now in creating a reference application architecture to use BPEL Web Services as a services layer. BizTalk isn't really the product to use for this because it's a bit heavy and it's more of an EAI tool than a pure process engine. It seems there are a few Java engines out there though...