As most readers are probably aware, the Web Services-Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) provides a broadly adopted process orchestration standard supported by many vendors today and used to define business processes that orchestrate services, systems, and people into end-to-end business processes and composite applications. However, in many ways BPEL's adoption has gotten ahead of the formal standardization process.

Over the years business processes have become automated to the point that the BPM community now considers the SOA language BPEL, designed for the orchestration of Web Services, as the best platform for building contemporary processes. But many processes retain some level of human activity, and BPEL's support for human interaction is problematic. Most attempts to integrate human workflow with BPEL, such as BPEL4People (as well as proprietary task subsystems offered by the major BPM vendors), try to fit human activities into BPEL's execution model. Human tasks are simply special steps in the larger process.

The natural visualization of a business process is of boxes and arrows arranged in a tree-like formation. A large process with numerous conditional paths forms a rather expansive tree that can't fir on a computer screen or printed page. If the process has loops, these are often represented as arrows pointing back to earlier boxes, resulting in an untidy graph structure. Although BPEL isn't a visual process language, its XML representation can form code trees that are no less cumbersome. A receive inside a sequence inside a flow inside a switch inside a pick, even if properly indented, can make a coder see double.

Let's face it, WS-BPEL 1.1 was not a great standard, and left so much out that many end users and vendors found it useless. In response, the vendors put a ton of proprietary extensions in their BPEL 1.1-based products, thus diluting its value to the point of 'Why bother?' This was a dirty little secret in the world of SOA. Considering that BPEL 2.0 is on the horizon, I think it's time we began to talk about what's really there, how you can fix it, and what you need to do to get from point A to point B.

Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), one of the key technologies for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), has become the accepted mechanism for defining and executing business processes in a common vendor-neutral way. Companies ranging from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and BEA to smaller organizations such as Fuego and Lombardi have committed to BPEL as a building block for SOA. BPEL, which has been designed specifically for defining business processes, supports typical interactions such as synchronous and asynchronous operation invocation, sequential and parallel flows, message correlations, fault and compensation handlers and activities triggered by events. Business processes often require human interactions as well.