Prashant Bhagat's Weblog

JavaOne 2008 was really good this time, at least from my perspective. There was a SOA track and I was very pleased to see a very enthusiastic response to the SOA pods. The attendees seemed to be using this technology, which is what I wanted to really witness. And it was heartening to see that, people were really using this technology.

Anyway, what I want to tell you is that we (me and Kiran) did a hands on lab titled "Orchestration of web services using WS-BPEL". Our primary objective was to "popularize" BPEL. At first, BPEL seems intimidating, especially if you start to read the specification. But, my experience is that once people start creating BPEL processes using some good tool and perhaps using some tutorials, they seem to find it easier. It is not necessary to get bogged down by all the constructs like compensation handlers, event handlers, correlations. You don't need to start with them. You can start with the basic scenarios. As you get to a point where you have more complex scenarios, then you can start looking at how BPEL solves your problem. This will often lead you to the complex features. At that point, it is much easier to understand the purpose of those features, because you already know what problem the construct is supposed to solve. So, if you are even a bit curious about BPEL, but didn't know where to start or found the spec. intimidating, I urge you to try the lab. It should take about 2-3 hours. And I'm sure after that you will love BPEL . The lab is made available online here.