Life After BPEL?

Wil M. P. van der Aalst, Marlon Dumas, Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede, Nick Russell, H. M. W. Verbeek, Petia Wohed

Abstract: The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) has emerged as a standard for specifying and executing processes. It is supported by vendors such as IBM and Microsoft and positioned as the “process language of the Internet”. This paper provides a critical analysis of BPEL based on the so-called workflow patterns. It also discusses the need for languages like BPEL. Finally, the paper addresses several challenges not directly addressed by BPEL but highly relevant to the support of web services.