Summary

In this chapter, we have looked at the human interactions in BPEL processes. Although BPEL has been initially designed for system-to-system interactions, it has quickly become obvious that business processes include human interactions.

The BPEL specification does not explicitly mention human interactions; therefore, two solutions have emerged over time. The first solution uses a dedicated Human Task service to handle human interactions. This way, a BPEL process can initiate a Human Task using the invoke activity in the same way as invoking any other service. The Human Task service exposes an API to the user interface application, which is responsible for showing the task list and the task details. This approach is common in all major SOA platforms, including Oracle.

The second approach has emerged with the BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask specifications. These specifications have standardized the approach to BPEL human interactions and made it portable through different SOA process servers...