There's a common misconception that Business Process Execution Language for
Web Services (BPEL) is useful only if all of your systems are Web services.
This article describes how Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) enables
BPEL to orchestrate nearly any legacy system as if it were a Web service -
without having to explicitly wrap or publish it as one. It also highlights
how JSR-208 will standardize this capability in the not-too-distant future.
Introduction
As Web services begin to take hold as an enterprise integration strategy,
BPEL has rapidly become the undisputed standard for business process
integration. BPEL provides a standard, portable language for orchestrating
services into end-to-end business processes and builds upon a decade of
progress in the areas of... (more)
J2EE application servers enabled mainstream developers to build sophisticated
multitiered Web applications that use mature standards and any of several
commercial and open source application server platforms. A similar pattern
has now emerged with the maturation of standard platforms for enabling
service-oriented architecture (SOA) through Web services. These Web services
platforms provi... (more)
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) facilitates the development of
applications as modular business services that can be easily integrated,
secured, and administered. Benefits of an SOA approach include more-rapid
development, decreased maintenance and change management costs, and improved
business visibility. However, achieving these benefits isn't automatic -
although many early adopte... (more)
Agile and adaptive business processes and supporting IT infrastructure are
the holy grail of enterprise applications. The industry is heading in the
right direction to start delivering on this promise. SOAs (service-oriented
architectures) promise to enable businesses to align their business processes
to customer needs, and optimize them to improve customer responsiveness and
drive effic... (more)
IT architectures have evolved to include process orchestration as a
fundamental layer due in no small part to the emergence and widespread
adoption of the WS-BPEL standard. WS-BPEL, also known as Business Process
Execution Language or just BPEL, is a standard owned by OASIS that provides
rich and comprehensive orchestration semantics. This article will provide a
brief overview of how BPE... (more)