Assumptions This Book Makes

This book assumes that the reader is comfortable with or has had some exposure to web services (especially Web Services Description Language, or WSDL) and XML, including XML Schema Definition (XSD) and XPath. Other prerequisites are:

Oracle SQL

Chapter 2 includes a few SQL statements in Oracle's syntax.

Java

Chapters 5 and 10 have a few lines of Java code embedded in BPEL.

UML (Unified Modeling Language)

The discussion of activity diagrams in Chapter 3 assumes the reader is comfortable with UML. In addition, many of the figures in the book use UML to illustrate designs.

Eclipse

The examples in Chapters 10 and 11 require Oracle BPEL Process Designer, which runs within the Open Source Eclipse integration development environment.

Visio

The BPMN portion of the example in Chapter 11 requires the use of ITpearls' Visio stencils.