The combination of business process management (BPM) with service-oriented architecture (SOA) is driving modeling for application development, said Steve Hendrick, group vice president of application development research at Independent Data Corp. (IDC).

Commenting on this week's release of model-driven SOA tools by Telelogic AB, he said, "I don't see where if you want to address SOA in a scaleable way, you can go down that path without support for modeling."

One of the big benefits of service-oriented architecture (SOA) development is that it approaches design from a business, as opposed to a technical, point of view. Unfortunately, SOA development projects can be more complicated than "regular" Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) projects. With SOA projects, there are often more stakeholders, more disparate technologies to integrate, and more possible misunderstandings about overall project goals.

The BPEL4WS 1.1 specification was submitted to OASIS back in 2004 and after three years of work by one of the largest technical committees at OASIS, WS-BPEL 2.0 finally became an OASIS standard on April 12, 2007. While adoption of the BPEL language has not been gated by the 2.0 standard or the OASIS stamp of approval - there are thousands of successful BPEL projects and deployments today - the formal publication of the standard is an important milestone and will further accelerate BPEL's adoption and vendor support.

Apache ODE ("Orchestation Director Engine") aims to produce an implementation of the WS-BPEL 2.0 standard suitable for embedding in a generic runtime context. ODE recently graduated from incubation to a fully-fledged top-level project and had its first release since leaving incubation. This note provides a nickel tour and teaser for ODE along with some BPEL concepts in the form of deploying and executing a simple process.