BPEL - Business Process Execution Language

BPEL is still in the press and news feeds as the next new thing in the Web Services space. BPEL is a definition language that uses XML to define business processes at a level where business analysts can define an enterprises processes but in a structure that can be used to execute this defined process and coordinate web service activation.

A new article at InfoWorld talks about the BPEL standard. But BPEL is not the only fish in the sea with WSCI (Web Services Choreography Interface) and WSCL (Web Services Conversation Language) as competing standards under development by the W3C standards organisation. BPEL is being developed under the OASIS standards organisation and is supported by some of the larger application and middleware vendors like IBM, BEA and Microsoft. To stop the W3C and OASIS fighting about these standards Oracle and a few other vendors are starting work to coordinate between these standards efforts. The idea is for BPEL to focus on the internal processes while WSCL on external processes so that these two languages are complimentary. Time will tell as to which standard becomes dominant.