Preface

Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL, WS-BPEL, or BPEL4WS) is the new standard for defining business processes with composition of services. It is the cornerstone of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). With its ability to define executable and abstract business processes it opens new doors in business process management and represents the top-down approach to the realization of SOA.

BPEL is supported by the majority of software vendors including Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, BEA, SAP, Hewlett-Packard, Siebel, and others. Most of them already have products that support BPEL; others will follow soon.

This book explains the BPEL standard, provides a step-by-step guide to designing and developing business processes in BPEL, defines the role of BPEL in SOA, and discusses how BPEL relates to the web services stack and to other standards. It also covers two important BPEL servers—the Oracle BPEL Process Manager and Microsoft BizTalk Server. The book presents the service-oriented approach to business process definition using web services, which enables us to develop loosely coupled solutions.