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 business process management, workflow, and
integration technologies. Built from the ground up aro... (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 efficiency. A process-oriented realization of SOAs is necessary to
deliver on this promise.
The process-oriented model is based on an SOA component model augmented with
an underlying formal model in w... (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 adopters of SOA have been able to realize its promise
fully, others have struggled to find the best architecture and design
patterns for this approach.
The SOA model is about asynchronous, loosely coup... (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 provide the same mainstream developer community with design
patterns for implementing composite applications that leverage adapters,
integration, transformation, business process management, and Web se... (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 BPEL came to be what it is today and then focus on the
latest developments in the BPEL standard and where we believe this standards
area will go over the next few years. In particular some of the key... (more)
Dave Shaffer has been helping customers use the Oracle BPEL Process Manager since 2001, managing implementation projects, providing technical training, and ensuring successful implementations. Prior to joining Oracle, Shaffer was a principal consultant at Collaxa, a managing director at Eleven Acceleration, and manager of a professional services group at Apple Computer.
Scott Sellers
Anthony Franco
Daniel Morris
Wayne Walls
Niki Acosta
Jereme Hancock
Oren Michels
Marvin Wheeler
Douglas Kim
