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JBI and BPEL in competition? Nonsense!

It has been recently reported in various news stories that some folks in the community regard JBI and WS-BPEL to be competing standards. This is pure nonsense!

I'm co-spec lead on JBI, and have been a member of the WS-BPEL technical committee at OASIS since the TC was formed in 2003. JBI has been carefully designed to support BPEL, so any claims of "overlap" are either false, or indicate that the JBI expert group isn't achieving its goals.

JBI is centred on abstract WSDL message exchange patterns. Normalized messages, exchanged via WSDL-defined operations, provide the mechanism for interoperation of components. Service engines provide and consume services at the abstract, portType level, to use WSDL 1.1 terminology. Guess what? This exactly fits the definition of WS-BPEL -- it too provides and consumes services using the abstract, portType level of WSDL. No coincidence here: this is by design.

Of course, WS-BPEL doesn't provide a complete solution to business process execution. It defines the process in terms of abstract messaging, but implementations must provide the "plumbing" to add real communication protocols (like SOAP over HTTP) into the mix. This is readily accomplished using JBI's binding components, but of course proprietary approaches are also possible.

JBI is all about breaking vendor lock-in. By using a standards-based infrastructure, end users can mix and match components to provide the needed services and bindings to create solutions that match their unique needs. Some vendors apparently object to this -- they much prefer current practice, which locks the user in to the vendor, due to the proprietary nature of their solutions. In this sense, JBI is in competition with BPEL -- closed implementations of BPEL designed to perpetuate vendor lock-in in business integration.

Posted at 02:27PM Oct 29, 2004 by rtenhove in Java Business Integration  |  Comments[2]