Chapter 1. Introduction to BPEL and SOA

BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services, also WS-BPEL, BPEL4WS) is a language used for composition, orchestration, and coordination of web services. It provides a rich vocabulary for expressing the behavior of business processes. In this chapter, we introduce BPEL, define its role in the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), and explain the process-oriented approach to SOA and the role of BPEL. We also provide short descriptions of the most important BPEL servers—the run‑time environments for execution of business processes specified in BPEL—and compare BPEL to other business process languages. In this chapter, we:

• Discuss the role of business processes and their automation
• Overview web services, ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), and SOA
• Discuss the composition of services
• Explain the role of BPEL in web service composition
• Explain the most important BPEL features
• Overview BPEL orchestration servers
• Compare BPEL with other standards
• Discuss the future of BPEL