Is BPEL the same as BPM, workflow or integration? |
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EXPERT RESPONSE FROM: Doron Sherman
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QUESTION POSED ON: 26 December 2003
Is BPEL the same as workflow, BPM or integration? Is BPEL the all-encompassing language for modeling process logic?
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A great deal of effort has been put into making BPEL a semantically-rich
language for composing services into business processes (and exposing
the latter as services). By combining XLANG and WSFL into BPEL, the
language is capable of expressing fairly complex patterns of process
logic. However, one of BPEL's design goals was to keep it simple and
clean and avoid as much as possible adding language constructs that may
hamper usability and general applicability.
For example, BPEL does not directly support abstractions for people,
roles, work items or inboxes/queues, hence BPEL is not equivalent to
workflow. Such capabilities can be added outside the scope of BPEL in a
service-oriented fashion, e.g. by adding a specialized "task service"
that manages people, roles, etc. BPEL is also not equivalent to BPM,
since the language does not specify a data model for process reporting,
analysis or monitoring/administration.
Finally, BPEL is not equivalent to integration, as the specification is
protocol independent and does not include common integration facilities
such as adapters, transformation, etc. As with workflow, such facilities
can be easily provided in a service-oriented manner into a BPEL solution
framework.
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