Although IBM officials declined to characterize the planned 2006 finalization as a delay, officials at BEA and Oracle called it just that.

"I think the expectations have been rather high that we would have been done by the end of the year, but at the current pace that we"ve been working, it"s looking like Q1 or Q2 of next year when we would have a final spec," said Tony de la Lama, vice president and unit director for integration products at BEA.

"There"s blocking and tackling pretty much going on right now," with issues being resolved, de la Lama added.

BPEL has functions such as language constructs to enable if-then-else statements for the 2.0 version. Dynamic, parallel invocation of services also is an important addition, for adapting the number of steps in a process based on the number of partners participating in a transaction, according to IBM.

Version 2.0 also improves the way that Web services are used to call out to partner links to enable more flexibility. But issues such as merging and creating documents still need to be addressed, BEA officials said. Error handling also is a focus.

"There"s a couple of issues still being resolved and people just want to take the time to do those things right," said Edwin Khodabakchian, vice president of software development at Oracle, which is participating in the BPEL 2.0 effort.