What is Business Process Execution language (BPEL) ?

Why BPEL came into picture?

The purpose/idea behind almost new technology for application development is to provide an business application with less effort and also which can be easily adapted to changing nature of business processes without much effort.

Integrating a different applications is always a difficult task for various functional or technical realted reasons.eventhough JAVA has provided the excellent platform to develop such applications,as business application cannot be isolated.

So,now here SOA will come into picture,we can say integration challenges were resolved by Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and web services technologies.Thus we can now access different functionalities of different legacy and new developed applications in a standard way (through web services). Such access to functionalities is important because typical companies have a large number of existing applications which have to be integrated.

Developing the web services and exposing the functionalities is not sufficient. We also need a way to compose these functionalities in the right order – a way to define business processes which will make use of the exposed functionalities. We would obviously prefer a relatively simple and straightforward way to define such processes, particularly because we know that business processes change often, therefore we would like to modify them easily.

This is where the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services, also WS-BPEL or BPEL4WS) becomes important. BPEL allows composition of web services and is thus the top-down approach to SOA – the process oriented approach to SOA.