BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask (WS-HT), while still specifications in the OASIS standardization process, can now be used in SOA development, said Mike Pellegrini, principal architect at Active Endpoints Inc. He has incorporated both specifications in this month's release of his company's visual orchestration systems (VOS) product, ActiveVOS 5.0, which provides graphic tools for design, development, testing, deployment and maintenance of SOA applications. IBM and SAP AG originally co-authored a white paper on integrating the work people do into BPEL. Those two vendors were joined in the development of the specification by Active Endpoints, Adobe Systems Inc., Oracle Corp. and BEA Systems Inc. While not yet ratified OASIS standards, Pellegrini said the two specifications have come far enough from the white paper stage to be taken seriously by developers.

This past week, Pellegrini demonstrated how BPEL4People and WS-HT can be used in the orchestration of a loan processing application. The demo showed a business process application where for routine loans a filter can automate the assessment of whether an applicant is a good or bad risk. However, when the applicant's credit history is a gray area, a loan officer must review the application and sign-off on its approval or denial.

That is where BPEL4People and WS-HT come into play. Using those two specifications, the hand off from the automated process to the loan officer is tracked by the BPEL-based application, Pellegrini said.

As he showed a view of this process through his visual orchestration tool, he explained: "It has been routed through the WS-HT specification task definition. It is routed to a task management system. Now, the system is just tapping it's fingers waiting for the human to finish."

Read the complete article by Rich Seeley, SearchSOA.com.