It's moving: BPEL4People is coming closer...!

The biggest disadvantage of bpel is the missing feature of human interaction integration. BPEL itself, according to the current standard WS-BPEL 2.0, is designed for fully automated processes only. But as real world projects show, most business processes have the need to do some activities non-automated - e.g. to get some decision from a real person. Therefore we have a whitepaper, BPEL4People, since several years now. Most vendors of bpel engines implemented custom solutions to handle human task stuff - like the BPEL4People whitepaper describes.
Now the scene is moving on: We will get a spec called WS-HT (Human Task), which describes a service interface for a human task workflow service, basically. Then we get WS-B4P (BPEL4People) which describes how to integrate WS-HT in WS-BPEL 2.0.
That's great news. So we have one more useful component for our SOA world.
Read details:

• Computerzeitung
• WS-HT
• WS-B4P

Hopefully, we will see these ideas at the OASIS site soon...

jBPM and BPEL

Tom Baeyens did a very good session on what it means to work with jPDL and jBPM. Especially the seam integration is worth a deeper look. What's with BPEL? Well, jBPM is miles away from what Oracle has in the BPEL area, as Tom admitted in the evening while having some beer. We had some discussions on when to use which language, jPDL or BPEL. More on that later on...

BPEL 2.0 is out as an OASIS standard

At last... the Business Process Execution Language WS-BPEL 2.0 is approved as an OASIS standard. See this announcement for details.
Oracle quots the following: "As one of the earliest supporters of BPEL, Oracle has been enabling production BPEL customers for the past several years. The release of BPEL 2.0 is a significant development for the industry and will serve to increase the already strong momentum behind the BPEL standard. In particular, our customers see BPEL 2.0 as enabling a smooth evolution path from BPEL 1.1 and are excited to see several key process orchestration requirements now included in the standard," said Don Deutsch, vice president Standards Strategy and Architecture, Oracle.

BPEL 2.0

Ivana Trickovic sitzt im TC (Technical Commitee) der OASIS, welches sich mit BPEL 2.0 beschäftigt. Fazit: BPEL 2.0 soll endlich erscheinen im September 2006. Wird aber immer noch keine Userinteraktion beinhalten. Damit beschäftigt sich ein Whitepaper von IBM und SAP, Arbeitsnahme: BPEL4PEOPLE.