Is it possible to migrate Oracle SOA BPEL instances from one environment to another with history?

What is the status of BPEL?

  • BPEL stands for the Business Process Execution Language, I believe. Systems built implementing this language were to be used to design systems that consisted of integrations of other systems through their APIs. It was one of the further developments of web services and SOA. So is there a market for it? Are the good implementations of it?

  • Answer:

    BPEL is used primarily for web service orchestrations rather than full business processes that might include human-facing activities. The BPMN standard for process model notation contains elements that cannot be represented in BPEL (hence the use of XPDL or BPMN 2.0 as a serialization language), so there are limitations to using BPEL in some situations. Note that XPDL is a file interchange format, whereas BPEL is an execution language; proponents of BPEL state that an advantage is that it can be executed directly (depending on your process engine, of course) and therefore is more easily transferable between different platforms. In reality, most people don't transfer their executing processes once they're running, so although that's a cool feature, it's not necessarily a useful one. Many vendors, even though they "support" BPEL, do so only as an input/output interchange format, and actually convert to a more efficient proprietary form for execution. If you're doing service-level (SOA) development and need something for orchestration atomic services into larger services with full transaction management, then BPEL is probably your best bet. If you're modeling business-level processes that include human interactions and may also call services, then you'll need something that can handle the full set of BPMN primitives, which BPEL can't do. In either case, you will probably use BPMN (or a subset of it) as the graphical modeling notation, it's just that one is serialized in BPEL and will likely have some transaction management additions to BPMN, whereas the human-facing processes will serialize to XPDL, BPMN 2.0 or a vendor-proprietary format.

Sandy Kemsley at Quora Visit the source

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Other answers

I think the answer depends on whom you ask and what's on their agenda. If you ask someone of a company trying to sell you an automation product based on XPDL, they will tell you BPEL is irrelevant. Personally I believe that BPEL was, is, and will be relevant in the coming years, because some large cooperations invested in the belonging infrastructure products. Today, it is a proven technology to automate backend processes and integration scenarios. BPEL is supported by all major vendors.

Sebastian Stein

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