Finally, the BPEL "assign" construct itself has changed. Aside from the changes to the "expression" and "query" attributes that we have seen previously, literal assignments must now be authored within a "literal" element, as shown below:

<assign>

  <copy>

      <from>

          <literal>

              <addr:phoneNumbertype="work">

                <addr:countryCode>1</addr:countryCode>

                <addr:areaCode>408</addr:areaCode>

                <addr:number>570-8000</addr:number>

            </addr:phoneNumber>

        </literal>

    </from>

    <to variable="phoneNumber" />

    </copy>

</assign>

Furthermore, not all issues are likely to be addressed and corrected in time for the upcoming release. It is expected that issues, such as filtering of EPRs, inclusion of Business Process Transaction Management (BTM) constructions, and accessibility to transport (i.e., SOAP) headers will be handled in a future version of the specification.

For all but the simplest business processes, migration from BPEL 1.1 to BPEL 2.0 is not an easy task. Some of the syntactic changes can be automated as shown in this article, however the semantic differences, especially when dealing with links, messaging, compensation handling, and data manipulation, will demand a comprehensive and time-consuming process.

Nonetheless, BPEL 2.0 is a huge step forward from BPEL 1.1. Whereas BPEL 1.1 provided a framework for BPM, BPEL 2.0 is moving towards allowing for the portability of execution of business processes across vendors, and as such, is an important hallmark in the industry.

References

• Business Process Execution Language for Web Services V1.1: http://dev2dev.bea.com/webservices/BPEL4WS.html
• Web Services Business Process Execution Language: www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=wsbpel
• XML Information Set: www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset/
• XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0: www.w3.org/TR/xpath
• XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language: www.w3.org/TR/xquery/