BPEL4People Specifications Integrate Human Interactions Into Business Process

A group of six technology vendors, including Active Endpoints, Adobe, BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle, and SAP AG, has announced the publication of 'BPEL4People' specifications, which define an approach for integrating human interactions using Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) 2.0.

BPEL4People extends the capabilities of WS-BPEL to support a broad range of human interaction patterns, allowing for expanded modeling of business processes within the WS-BPEL language.

Specification Extracts

BPEL4People is comprised of two specifications including:

- WS-BPEL Extension for People, which layers features on top of WS-BPEL to describe human tasks as activities that may be incorporated as first-class components in WS-BPEL process definitions.

- Web Services Human Task introduces the definition of stand-alone human tasks, including the properties, behavior and operations used to manipulate them. Capabilities provided by Web Services Human Task may be utilized by Web services-based applications beyond WS-BPEL processes.

The WS-BPEL Extension for People specification introduces a set of elements which extend the standard BPEL elements and enable the modeling of human interactions, which may range from simple approvals to complex scenarios such as separation of duties, and interactions involving ad-hoc data. The specification introduces the people activity as a new type of basic activity which enables the specification of human interaction in processes in a more direct way. The implementation of a people activity could be an inline task or a standalone human task defined in the WS-HumanTask specification.

The WS-HumanTask language introduces a grammar for describing human tasks and notifications. Both design time aspects, such as task properties and notification properties, and runtime aspects, such as task states and events triggering transitions between states are covered by the language. Finally, it introduces a programming interface which can be used by applications involved in the life cycle of a task to query task properties, execute the task, or complete the task. This interface helps to achieve interoperability between these applications and the task infrastructure when they come from different vendors.

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