BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) is too machine-oriented, catering to applications talking to other applications, they say. Most business processes need the human touch somewhere along the line. Consider these un-automatable scenarios: A process may need an executive’s approval to proceed any further. Work may flow like a river, but it also encounters plenty of waterfalls, dams and locks on the way — points at which humans may need to jump in to keep things moving.

Extreme transaction processing (XTP) is being added to complex event processing (CEP) in service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations for the financial services industry, explains David Chappell, vice president and chief technologist for SOA at Oracle Corp. Chappell: "What we're seeing is that SOA coupled with a class of applications coined as extreme transaction processing or XTP is the future for financial services infrastructure. So IT continues to be seen as the enabler.

Building SOA-Based Composite Applications Using NetBeans IDE 6 is a new book from Packt which helps users in designing, building, testing and debugging service oriented applications with ease using XML, BPEL and Java web Services. Written by Frank Jennings and David Slater, this book discusses the various tools provided by the Enterprise pack to design, build, and test applications from a single IDE.

WebLogic 10.3 Tech preview now supports Service Component Architecture (SCA) runtime. The SCA specification has two main parts: implementation of service components (which can be done in any language) and the assembly model which is the linking of components through wiring (which is done through XML files). Every component technology (Spring, POJO, EJB etc) that wants to participate in the SCA framework should support SCA metadata. The SCA specification defines language bindings for each of the technologies.