Composite Materials

WS-BPEL 2.0 (almost) out of the oven

After over 3-1/2 years, the WS-BPEL technical committee (TC) at OASIS finally hit a milestone we have all been awaiting for a very long time: the TC has submitted WS-BPEL 2.0 to OASIS for approval as an OASIS specification.

We will soon see some official announcements, webinars, etc., to properly introduce the completed specification. I'll just say that the new, soon-to-be standard is a huge improvement over the previous non-standard specification, BPEL4WS 1.1. Not only is the language more clearly and rigorously defined, but it also far more consistent, powerful, portable, and, in general, more useful. It has certainly been worth the wait!

During this 3-1/2 year journey, I've come to better know and admire the TC members. I am also impressed with the willingness of the participating corporations to contribute time and talent (not to mention intellectual property) to the cause of creating a truly open web service-based business process language. I feel honored to work with such people, and know that we "done good."

For me this hasn't been a mere intellectual exercise. Sun has "skin in the game", as a colleague of mine is fond of saying. WS-BPEL is supported in Open ESB, the Java EE 5 SDK (which includes a subset of Open ESB), and in the NetBeans 5.5 Enterprise Pack. I still am impressed with the Enterprise Pack; the interactive WS-BPEL debugger is, to me, still a Cool Thing. So take WS-BPEL 2.0 out for a spin; it is The Way to add stateful processes to your web services.

Posted at 05:28PM Feb 05, 2007 by rtenhove in Service Oriented Architecture  |  Comments[2]