The Future of BPEL

BPEL should be used as a language, which allows business processes to be technically executed. When we look back, a lot of projects used BPEL in other ways: mostly in integration scenarios, where the process oriented development, the major exception handling capabilities and the monitoring features brought great benefit. Maybe, it will turn out, that BPEL is not the right language, when it comes to real business processes. Maybe, the executable BPMN scenario will deliver us more benefit for that special purpose. Another point is the evolvement of the routing capabilities of the Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs). While in the open source world, we see things like Apache Camel, which applies the standard Message Exchange Patterns (MEPs) to an ESB like ServiceMix, also the commercial versions (Oracle Enterprise Service Bus, Oracle Service Bus (AKA BEA ALSB) are greatly enhanced with routing logic. This all questions the future of BPEL in the Oracle world for business process oriented development. It will be interesting to see the emerging tool suites and the combinations of products over the next 2-3 years. Also interesting is the evolvement of executable BPMN and the BPM roundtripping on the other hand.