As most readers are probably aware, the Web Services-Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) provides a broadly adopted process orchestration standard supported by many vendors today and used to define business processes that orchestrate services, systems, and people into end-to-end business processes and composite applications. However, in many ways BPEL's adoption has gotten ahead of the formal standardization process.
The BPEL4WS 1.1 specification was submitted to OASIS back in 2004 and after three years of work by one of the largest technical committees at OASIS, WS-BPEL 2.0 finally became an OASIS standard on April 12, 2007. While adoption of the BPEL language has not been gated by the 2.0 standard or the OASIS stamp of approval - there are thousands of successful BPEL projects and deployments today - the formal publication of the standard is an important milestone and will further accelerate BPEL's adoption and vendor support.
