Service Oriented Architecture Field Guide for Executives

A.5. BUSINESS PROCESS ORCHESTRATION STANDARDS

Having a standard way to define a business process has several advantages:

• You can use best-of-breed tooling to model your business process. Later, you can execute that process in your SOA vendor's platform.

• You can easily hire resources. If a resource knows the standard, it will be relatively easy for her to get up to speed with your SOA vendor's implementation of the standard.

Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL, or simply BPEL) is the primary standard for defining a business process. The latest version is 2.0. It is currently being maintained by OASIS.

WSBPEL was primarily designed for fully automated interaction between services. It did not directly address situations where services are rendered by human beings. Several SOA vendors came up with their own approach for allowing a WSBPEL process to interact with human services. As of 2007, two standards have emerged in this area. Web Services Human Task (WS-HumanTask) provides a way to define a human task. WS-BPEL Extension extends WSBPEL and provides a way to execute the human tasks from a business process.