Human Tasks in BPEL

So far we have seen that human interaction in business processes can get quite complex. Although BPEL specification does not specifically cover human interactions, BPEL is appropriate for human workflows. BPEL business processes are defined as collections of activities that invoke services. BPEL does not make a distinction between services provided by applications and other interactions, such as human interactions.

There are mainly two approaches to support human interactions in BPEL. The first approach is to use a human workflow service. Several vendors today have created workflow services that leverage the rich BPEL support for asynchronous services. In this fashion, people and manual tasks become just another asynchronous service from the perspective of the orchestrating process and the BPEL processes stay 100% standard.

The other approach has been to standardize the human interactions and go beyond the service invocations. This approach resulted in the workflow specifications...