WS-BPEL uses Web services standards to describe business process activities as Web services, defining how they can be composed to accomplish specific tasks.
“The concept of BPEL that began in the earliest days of Web services has become a cornerstone, not only for bringing more finely grained business processes closer to the business department, but also for ensuring that common ways can be constructed among technology providers designing frameworks for future service-oriented business processes,” said Charles Abrams, research director at Gartner. “The approval of WS-BPEL as an OASIS standard should be noted as a milestone in the fulfillment of the open Web services vision.”
WS-BPEL defines a model and a grammar for describing the behavior of a business process based on interactions between the process and its partners. The interaction with each partner occurs through Web services interfaces.
