As Published In September/October 2004

New BPEL Process Manager for Oracle
By Rich Schwerin

Oracle Application Server 10g integrates new Web services orchestration functionality.

On the gridiron and in the boardroom, cooperation often leads to success. Just as teammates and board members, respectively, need to work together, business partners need their applications and services to do the same—witness the ascension of Web services. And while Web services allow applications to easily exchange information, it's only when they're orchestrated and coordinated into long-running business flows that businesses can realize their true value. That's where BPEL comes in.

BPEL—Business Process Execution Language, also known as Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS)—is an industry standard for orchestrating discrete services into end-to-end business processes. Developers need to publish synchronous and asynchronous Web services and compose them into reliable, transactional business flows. BPEL helps enable this, with built-in support for XML manipulation, parallel processing, conditional branching, exception management, compensating transactions, and nonstructured events.

Oracle BPEL Process Manager, based on Oracle's recent acquisition of Collaxa, is a scalable, BPEL-based orchestration server that supports modeling, connecting, deploying, and managing BPEL processes; it's available both as a standalone product and as an option for Oracle Application Server 10g Enterprise Edition. In addition to BPEL, Oracle Application Server 10g supports XML, SOAP, WSDL, WS-Coordination, and WS-Transaction—specifications that let applications flexibly find each other and seamlessly interact in a platform-independent model.

What does that mean for application developers? With Oracle Application Server 10g enabling end-to-end Web services development, orchestrating those services into business processes is the next logical step, and Oracle BPEL Process Manager does exactly that.

"The core business issue with BPEL is integration," says Rob Cheng, product marketing director of Oracle Application Server 10g. "BPEL's goal is to find an easier, more flexible, more lightweight way to address integration problems—for connecting today's legacy applications, as well as for building tomorrow's more modular, composable applications."

BPEL processes can coordinate not only simple flows but also more sophisticated interactions, including distributed exceptions, parallel branching, and nondeterministic events. A flexible and open Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF)-based binding framework allows BPEL processes to reach out to XML-based Web services as well as to JCA, JMS, user workflow, e-mail, and EDI. This means BPEL can describe Web services and any other systems involved in a large, distributed application.

"Our comprehensive and scalable implementation of the BPEL standard complements Oracle Application Server," says Edwin Khodabakchian, Collaxa CEO. "Oracle BPEL Process Manager makes Web service composition and process orchestration first-class citizens of the Oracle Application Server."

Next Steps Learn more about Oracle BPEL

For developers facing myriad integration challenges, Oracle Application Server 10g is a multifaceted solution for building, integrating, coordinating, and publishing Web services and business processes.

A variety of tools let developers expose part of their existing systems and applications as coarse-grained, XML-driven services. BPEL offers the natural next step: It provides a rich abstraction for composing those services into collaborative and transactional process flows. Those flows are themselves services that can be recursively integrated into larger processes or consumed by other Web services clients.

"Oracle Application Server is a single platform addressing all of an organization's integration challenges," says Cheng. "It provides application-to-application integration, business-to-business integration, business process management, data integration, and Web services integration. And BPEL is another milestone in Oracle's Web services infrastructure, marrying support for Web services and SOA with our larger integration offerings."