Abstract business processes
Although the BPEL name suggests that this is a language for specifying executable business processes, BPEL supports both executable business processes and abstract business processes. Abstract business processes are partially specified processes that are not intended to be executed. As abstract processes are not executable, the question is: What are they useful for? There are several use cases where abstract business processes can be useful. The BPEL specification defines two such cases:
Abstract processes can be used as templates, which hide execution details and have extension points for adding behavior
Abstract processes can be used to describe the externally observable service behavior
There can be other use cases for abstract processes.
The most common scenario is to use abstract processes as a template to define executable processes. Abstract processes can be used to replace sets of rules usually expressed in natural language, which is often ambiguous. This...
