The Future of BPEL

OASIS is responsible for further development of BPEL since April 2003. An OASIS Technical Committee, called WSBPEL TC, has been formed for the development of a new BPEL version, called WS-BPEL 2.0. The technical committee, which supervises and influences further development of BPEL, has many new members. This ensures that BPEL will be extended with new features and also ensures continuity of development. The number of participants involved in BPEL shows that industry support is large and still increasing. More information on WSBPEL TC can be found at http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=wsbpel.

WS-BPEL version 2.0 is at the time of writing in the working draft stage, without any dates announced for final release. Based on the working drafts, WS-BPEL 2.0 does not show major differences from BPEL 1.1. The concepts on which BPEL is based on will stay unchanged. Version 2.0 will, however, introduce improvements and enhancements to the language, which will make it even more powerful. There will be a few new activities for loops (such as <repeatUntil> and <forEach>), variable assignments will be simplified, and improvements will be made to fault handling, compensation, and event handling. Partner links will be improved and will enable automatic initialization. There will probably also be some minor changes in function names and a few new standard faults will be defined. At the time of writing it is not clear whether WS-BPEL 2.0 will also provide support for user interactions, a field not covered by the current BPEL specification.

We can see that WS-BPEL 2.0 will be an evolution of the current BPEL version 1.1. To upgrade business processes specified in BPEL 1.1 to version 2.0 will take only minor effort.