Representing real business processes in software
I've long been a believer that even though
BPEL has "Business Process" as part of its full name, it's really a declarative design and execution language for composing web services and application functionality and nothing more. It's for that reason that any time we write something that refers to technology vendors' integration offerings, if BPEL is part of the conversation, wherever possible we avoid using the term "business process". At the very best what vendors are really representing are definitions of
integration processing.
However I have to be honest and say that our attitude has been driven only mostly by real understanding of the tech details, and to some degree by general cynicism (from decades on the receiving end of previous bait-and-switch tech marketing tactics).
So I was delighted when I stumbled across
this excellent article on the challenges faced in the formalisation of BPM technology. It clearly and honestly explains the good and bad not only of BPEL but also of XPDL, BPMN and assorted other definition efforts.
Hooray for Bruce. Recommended reading for anyone thinking seriously about BPM, SOA and Web Services technologies as a potential business software architecture stack.
