BPEL
BPEL in a nutshell
The complex business processes and services can be described, created and executed by BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), not only in your company but also in collaboration with your external partners. Adopted by well-known companies like Bea, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle unified in the OASIS Consortium the WS-BPEL standard is built on top of the approved Webservice standards. Using WS-BPEL you will achieve an independent system, secure integration and control of a wide range of applications and services, accessible also at the distributed infrastructure.
Functionality
BPEL describes business processes as loosely coupled, statefull Webservices. Even though BPEL does not define a graphical representation of the modelled processes, nearly every developer of BPEL workflow environments offers a graphic development platform that eases the modelling and maintenance of the workflow diagrams.
BPEL defines two kinds of business process models (BPM). Abstract BPMs are used to visualize the structure and the behaviour of business processes. Executable BPMs implement the abstract BPMs and can be deployed in a workflow engine. This way, the separation of business process modelling can be smartly reached by the business analysts and business process implementation by the development team.
Application areas of BPEL
BPEL is very well suited for all kinds of projects in organisations where business processes are repeatedly executed. While executing the workflows, BPEL ensures that every workflow is processed completely and in a consistent high quality. BPEL eases the modelling, overview and tracking of processes in your organisation through the use of graphical modelling environments and tracking windows. These tools in combination with the modularisation concept of BPEL allow you to analyse given workflows easily, optimise them and if necessary replace them whole or parts of them by new, improved services.
Advantages over established technologies and products
Unlike conventional technologies, BPEL does not only define the interfaces between different services belonging to a workflow, but also describes their structure and interaction. Because all services are encapsulated by Webservices, it is possible to integrate new external systems in short time or to replace existing services or even whole systems with new ones. Another great advantage using BPEL is the fact, that non-functional requirements like data security, access control or event tracking does not have to be considered during the design of the application logic. These requirements are encapsulated by the BPEL runtime environment and can be configured globally for all services by an administrator. In addition to functionality of conventional application servers BPEL application environments provide versatile possibilities to monitor processes even at runtime. This way its possible to analyse and solve bottlenecks or problems faster than ever.
