WS-BPEL 2.0

• WS-BPEL version 2.0 was developed by the OASIS WS-BPEL Technical Committee and approved as an OASIS Standard in April 2007.

BPEL4People

BPEL4People is now being advanced within the OASIS BPEL4People Technical Committee. It was originally published by Active Endpoints, Adobe, BEA, IBM, Oracle and SAP in June 2007 as two specifications:

• BPEL4People version 1.0 introduces a BPEL extension to address human interactions in BPEL as a first-class citizen. It defines a new type of basic activity which uses human tasks as an implementation, and allows specifying tasks local to a process or use tasks defined outside of the process definition. This extension is based on the WS-HumanTask specification.

• Web Services Human Task (WS-HumanTask) version 1.0 introduces the definition of human tasks, including their properties, behavior and a set of operations used to manipulate human tasks. A coordination protocol is introduced in order to control autonomy and life cycle of service-enabled human tasks in an interoperable manner.

WS-BPEL 2.0 Extensions

The following specifications have not yet been submitted into the open standards process:

• BPEL-SPE (WS-BPEL 2.0 Extensions for Sub-Processes)
• BPELJ (WS-BPEL 2.0 Extensions for Java)

BPEL4WS

• BPEL4WS, which combines IBM's WSFL and Microsoft's XLANG, is the precursor to WS-BPEL 2.0. BPEL4WS was submitted to OASIS for standardization in April 2003.

Note on spec names/versions: Although BPEL4WS appeared as both a 1.0 and 1.1 version, the OASIS WS-BPEL Technical Committee voted to name their specification 'WS-BPEL 2.0.' This change in name was done to align BPEL with other Web services standard naming conventions which start with WS- and accounts for the significant enhancements between BPEL4WS 1.1 and WS-BPEL 2.0.

 

See also:

- BPEL4People — How People Interact with Business Processes by Ivana Trickovic