Section 14.5. Summary

14.5. Summary

Workflow languages have been around for many years, but customers are no longer willing to be locked into static environments with proprietary tools and languages. Integrated into the Web services stack and natively built for the dynamic, networked SOA environment, BPEL provides a solution to this problem.

In short, BPEL provides the full power of established workflow concepts coupled with recursive composition and dynamic binding to partners, while exploiting the rest of the Web services architecture. BPEL's place in the Web services stack allows it to inherit the expressiveness and power of both the underlying and the orthogonal standards for use in your business processes. Underlying standards provide interoperability through standardized interfaces and messaging protocols. Orthogonal (existing or upcoming) standards allow you to add features or quality-of-service aspects to your processes without changing the process model.

This chapter explained the motivation for and the architectural foundation of BPEL and its role in the SOA world. The concrete realizations of these concepts, illustrated with examples, provided the link between the architectural foundation and the concrete language elements. This chapter discussed the possible future directions for BPEL, which is finally undergoing its final phases of standardization.