BPEL 2.0 is delayed

28.10.2005
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Paul Krill ist Redakteur unserer US-Schwesterpublikation InfoWorld.

Standard mechanisms to orchestrate business processes in Web services applications will have to wait until next year for final OASIS approval. Amendments to enable human interactions as part of this technology will wait even longer.

Version 2.0 of Web Services Business Process Execution Language, usually referred to as BPEL, is being delayed until the first half of 2006 while technologists at OASIS continue sorting through approximately three dozen issues, whittled down from a list that had totaled around 230.

Considered critical for applications such as transactional and B2B systems, the XML-based BPEL technology has wide industry support. Microsoft, IBM, and BEA Systems introduced it in 2002. Sun Microsystems, which initially resisted the effort, was one of many vendors to back it later.

Preliminary BPEL 1.1 and 2.0 technologies already are in use in products such as Oracle BPEL Process Manager and IBM WebSphere Process Server. But BPEL itself has yet to be formally adopted by OASIS as an official specification. This adoption would serve to make it a de facto industry standard.

"What"s happening is the normal standardization process. We have a large number of companies represented on the technical committee," said Diane Jordan, program director for emerging software standards at IBM and a co-chairperson of the WSBPEL Technical Committee at OASIS.