"BPEL will be more flexible and more extensible," Fricke said.

BPEL support and release of an ESB are vital to JBoss, said analyst Shawn Willett of Current Analysis.

"It's extremely important if they are to have any credibility as an enabler of an SOA. Just having an application server is not enough," Willett said in an e-mail.

"They need an infrastructure to make services practical in a corporate environment. JBoss is also falling behind others in the open source world, as Apache now has ServiceMix, and of course Sun is moving to open-source its ESB. So they needed to act. Adding BPEL support is a no-brainer but was complicated by the fact that the BPM engine they purchased did not originally natively support BPEL. So they had to go back and retrofit it," Willett said.

BEA's beta release of JBoss ESB serves as a prelude to a final version due later this year. Acting as the glue for enterprises to deploy an SOA, the ESB hosts and integrates services and processes. The ESB beta release is downloadable here (http://labs.jboss.com/portal/jbossesb/downloads).