The Web Services Business Process Execution Language Version 2.0 Specification is approaching the public review stage. This is an OASIS specification and governs process execution in SOA.
BPEL has the support of many major vendors, notably Oracle which advanced the state of BPEL with its acquisition of Collaxa. There are many BPEL engines available including open source ActiveBPEL and Twister.
BPEL is a maturing standard for business process execution. It evolved from precursor languages WSFL and XLANG. BPEL focuses on state transitions, referred to as an Abstract Process, not on fine-grained business logic, and thus A BPEL Abstract Process represents a set of publicly observable behaviors in a standardized fashion. An Abstract Process includes information such as when to wait for messages, when to send messages, when to compensate for failed transactions, etc.
What's new in WS-BPEL 2.0?
* New activity types (if-then-else, repeatUntil, validate, forEach, extensionActivity)
* Completion condition in forEach activity
* Variable initialization
* XSLT for variable transformations (New XPath extension function bpws:doXslTransform)
* XPath access to variable data (XPath variable syntax $variable[.part]/location)
* XML schema variables in Web service activities (for WS-I doc/lit style service interactions)
* Locally declared messageExchange (internal correlation of receive and reply activities)
* Clarification of Abstract Processes (syntax and semantics)
The specification does not address "human endpoints" or workflows, which is addressed in an informal proposal called "BPEL for People".
The specification lists the following editors.
Alexandre Alves, BEA
Assaf Arkin, Intalio
Sid Askary
Ben Bloch
Francisco Curbera, IBM
Yaron Goland, BEA
Neelakantan Kartha, Sterling Commerce
Canyang Kevin Liu, SAP
Dieter König, IBM
Mike Marin, FileNet
Vinkesh Mehta, Deloitte
Satish Thatte, Microsoft
Danny van der Rijn, TIBCO Software
Prasad Yendluri, webMethods
Alex Yiu, Oracle
