Without further adieu, an industrywide specification for orchestrating Web services in business processes appears set to be formally adopted by OASIS next week, nearly five years after the proposal first debuted.
Voting on Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) 2.0, or BPEL, by OASIS members concludes this Saturday, and the organization expects it to be formally approved. An announcement is anticipated on Monday.
BPEL is an XML language that uses Web services to describe service interactions, said John Evdemon, co-chairman of the BPEL technical committee at OASIS and a member of the architecture strategy team at Microsoft Corp. It is considered crucial to service-oriented architecture and functions with the WS-* (pronounced "ws star") Web services standards.