Be nice, Jeff. BPEL may be an "execution" language, but it has a number of shortcomings in terms of its ability to represent business processes. Many vendors (including Microsoft) provide orchestration engines that offer a number of features not supported by BPEL. Most of these vendors elected to support BPEL via import/export rather than build new native-processing BPEL engines with less capabilities than their existing products.
As long as the engine can process the BPEL, why does it matter whether it does so directly or via import? I will grant you that the export feature frequently has challenges regarding fidelity, but only because the capabilities of many orchestration engines exceeds that capabilities of BPEL to accurately represent the process. I have to ask, though, why you might want to export the process as BPEL? Do you view portability of business processes from one vendor's orchestration engine to another as a core benefit supplied by BPEL? Do you view portable BPEL processes as a viable goal? I agree with you that BPEL was not designed to be a business process serialized representation language. Which is unfortunate. It would be more valuable if it had been. The industry could use a decent representation language that can effectively represent popular business process modeling notations, such as BPMN. I recall that OMG was supposedly working on a serialized BPMN, but I haven't heard anything about it in more than a year. Anne On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 10:40 AM, jeffrschneider <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > My bad John, I thought that when you said "BPEL is a an orchestration > language" that you meant "BPEL is an orchestration language". > > I'll quit taking you so literally. If I understand you correctly what > you meant to say is "BPEL is an orchestration language, however, we at > Microsoft see it as an import/export representation, where you may lose > semantic fidelity, because it wasn't designed to be an import/export > language." > > Again, my bad - I thought that the "E" in BPEL stood for "execution" > but I now remember, you're correct, it stands for "represenation". > > Cool to hear that "everybody is doing it..." > Jeff > > --- In [email protected], "John Evdemon" > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> On 31 Aug 2008 at 19:38, jeffrschneider wrote: >> >> > Good to see that you've come around: >> > http://tinyurl.com/6khvmu >> >> Not sure what your point is here. The fact that BizTalk uses BPEL as >> an import/export representation doesn't make it unique - many tools >> do this. >> > >
