Customer Reviews

Business Process Execution Language for Web Services BPEL and BPEL4WS 2nd Edition

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This is a good book for those seeking an initial view of process and BPEL. The book covers the basics of BPEL profile 1.1, and until chapter 4 is a good resource of information. I don't like books that binds the technology to an specific implementation, and that's the case of the book after chapter 4, it binds examples to Oracle BPEL process servers (which I've already used in production and find it a poor implementation) and Microsoft Biz Talk (never used it). It would be much better if more real world examples could be provided instead of specific providers mechanisms for deploying, creating etc. This should be a readers choice, and the product manuals take care of that. I'm a great fan of the author, have read many of his books, this one had everything to be on my top shell, but, if only there was no more chapters after the 4th.

Just my 2 cents.

There have been an entire bowl of alphabet soup regarding various kinds of distributed processing systems. All of them, in their time, achieved a certain level of usage. None of them has done much to change the basic way we do business communications. That may be changing.

The development of the internet from a little system to exchange technical papers to a worldwide set of sites, all speaking internet protocol, have generated the expansion of broadband services all across the world from New York City to small towns in the third world. The basic ability of an individual to seek information has subsequently been expanded with XML so that information can be exchanged between computers of different types with different operating systems easily and without having to understand the characteristics of the computer at the other end. XML is a very open standard and it has some weaknesses. Enter BPEL to establish a set of standards, some common ways of doing things, and a generally more organized approach.

BPEL servers have been developed by, and there are URLs to: Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, BEA, Sun and at least four open-source implementations.

While this is a beginners book in so far as BPEL is concerned, it is presumed that the reader has some experience with XML, web services, and some kind of web services developent system such as J2EE or .NET.