What is BPEL and why is it so important to my business?
BPEL stands for Business Process Execution Language, and comes from a standards consortium consisting of BEA Systems, IBM, and Microsoft, BPEL combines and replaces IBM’s WebServices Flow Language (WSFL) and Microsoft’s XLANG specification. BPEL provides an orchestration engine for describing exchanges of information internally or externally. BPEL deals explicitly with the functional aspects of business processes: control flow (branch, loop, parallel), asynchronous conversations and correlation, long running nested units of work, faults and compensation. BPEL directly addresses these business process challenges: coordinating asynchronous communication between services, correlating message exchanges between parties, implementing parallel processing of activities, manipulating data between partner interactions, supporting long running business transactions and activities, and providing consistent exception handling. In Power to The BPEL: A Technology for Web Services, David Petersen wrot
