This is the official community gathering place and information resource for the WS-BPEL OASIS Standard and related specifications. BPEL uses Web services standards to describe business process activities as Web services, defining how they can be composed to accomplish specific tasks. This is a community-driven site, and the public is encouraged to contribute content.
When designing an SOA solution, it's not always clear whether you should use a Web services BPEL process or an ESB mediation flow. This article by Marc Fasbinder of IBM describes considerations that will help you decide which is right for you.
This paper, by Nick Russell and Wil M.P. van der Aalst, proposes the use of workflow resource patterns, as a means of evaluating the BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask proposals. The resource patterns provide a comprehensive description of the various factors that are relevant to human resource management and work distribution in business processes. They offer a means of examining the capabilities of the two proposals from a conceptual standpoint in a way that is independent of specific technological and implementation considerations.
The SOA readiness survey of 180 UK organisations by Birmingham-based systems integrator Griffiths Waite showed that of the 47% of respondents pursuing SOA, 20% had already implemented at least one SOA project.
And of that 20%, almost half (49%) said their main reason for adopting SOA was to achieve IT flexibility and 14% said it would enable them to get the most out of their IT investments by providing industry standards for accessing functionality and resources.
"Composability within SOA" will be the focus of Open Standards 2008, the fifth annual symposium hosted by OASIS, the international, not-for-profit consortium. The event, which will be held in Santa Clara, California, 28 April — 1 May, will examine the critical issues faced when architecting service-oriented applications and the benefits being reaped by real-world implementations that take advantage of Web services transactions.
This technical article by Chad W. Coffman discusses how File Adapters are often used as a Receive activity in a BPEL process, polling a directory for a file to arrive and starting based on the state of the file - number of records, filename pattern, directory location, etc. But what if the file adapter is not used as the initiating activity? The adapter configuration options change when the adapter is configured to work 'inline' (synchronous read or write operation) instead of at the beginning of the BPEL process.
