Wireless Networking

OASIS Ratifies BPEL 2.0 Standard

New specification promises to help companies ease business-processes integration using Web services

April 14, 2007

2 Min Read

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, a vendor-backed industry-standards body, disclosed this week that it has ratified a new version of its Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) spec, which defines business processes as Web services.

The formal approval of WS-BPEL 2.0 marks an important step towards the SOA vision of loosely coupled services built from reusable components. However, not all business processes necessarily lend themselves to WS-BPEL and the other standards it includes, such as SOAP and WSDL. Many Web services will continue to use REST or other approaches.
Andy Dornan
NWC Senior Technology Editor

OASIS said the new standard will help developers produce frameworks for service-oriented business processes and help companies roll out specialized applications more quickly in support of particular business activities.WS-BPEL 2.0 describes the semantics and structure for the way a business process works by defining its interdependencies with other applications and processes, including those of third-party partners. The standard explains how multiple services collaborate to reach a common business objective.

An OASIS spokesperson described the new specification as reusable definition that can be used for abstract processes that may have more than one use as well as for executable processes. This helps make it easier for companies to implement business-to-business transactions without having to disclose proprietary information.

The standard is posted on OASIS's Web site at http://www.oasis-open.org/home/index.php.