Developing Business Processes with BPEL

BPEL uses an XML-based vocabulary that allows us to specify and describe business processes. As mentioned in Chapter 1, with BPEL, you can describe business processes in two distinct ways:

• Executable business processes specify the exact details of business processes and can be executed by a BPEL engine. In the majority of cases we will use BPEL to specify executable processes.

• Abstract business processes specify only the public message exchange between parties, without including the specific details of process flows. They are not executable and are rarely used.

This chapter focuses on executable business processes. Abstract business processes are covered in the next chapter.

Executable business processes are processes that compose a set of existing services. When we describe a business process in BPEL, we actually define a new web service that is a composition of existing services. The interface of the new BPEL composite web service uses a set of port...