BPEL4WS and WSDL

Some people confuse BPEL4WS and WSDL; in reality they are very different concepts. First, BPEL4WS leverages WSDL, providing a mechanism to create a coordinating process on top of new or existing Web services defined by WSDL (for more information, see Chapter 15).

WSDL messages and XML schema-type definitions provide the data model leveraged by BPEL4WS processes, and the XPath standard provides support for data manipulation. As mentioned above, all external services are exposed as WSDL services, which is the way Web services work.

Again, at its essence, BPEL4WS is a process modeling mechanism layered on top of the service model defined by WSDL and leveraging a peer-to-peer interaction between the services (see Figure 13.1). Thus, ...

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