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The BPEL4WS specification has been published by IBM, Microsoft and BEA
in August, 2002. Since then, a slew of vendors in the application
server, EAI and Web services categories have announced future plans to
support it.
At this point in time, IBM and Microsoft seem to have concrete plans to
introduce BPEL4WS as part of their existing software platforms,
WebSphere (http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0130ibmwebsp.html) and
.NET (http://www.entmag.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=5541)
respectively.
In the meantime, two smaller companies, Collaxa (whom I'm affiliated with) and Momentum Software, announced commercial availability of BPEL4WS engines. Collaxa's BPEL
orchestration server is based on J2EE, while Momentum Software ChoreoServer is based on .NET and is geared towards ISVs.
For an extensive review of the current technologies, tools and standards
related to Web service orchestration, see HP's Chris Peltz survey. As BPEL4WS gains momentum and (likely) submitted to a standards body, more commercial implementations of this crucial Web service specification is expected to become available.
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