Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)

Many organisations and vendors are now providing external interfaces to applications via web services. These web services allow external applications to access the services or interact with the internal capabilities of the application. This simple service architecture allows for the basic application interaction and integration between systems, however these simple service framework does not support coordination to support workflows where a series of web services need to be called to support a single business process.

A new standard currently under development is the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) that defines these business processes. An extension to BPEL is BPEL for Web Service (BPEL4WS) that defines how BPEL can be used to define the required workflows when using web services.

IBM has released an article that describes the use of BPEL4WS in IBM WebSphere J2EE Server. The BPEL standard can be found in a number of locations on the Internet (go here).

For a List of the different web services both IBM and Microsoft provide a list of standards:
Go to IBM Web Services Standards Page
Go to Microsoft's Web Services Standards Page