Analysis of BPEL and High-Level Web Service Orchestration: Bringing Benefits to the Problems of the Business

Abstract

As a business evolves, the number of systems used to run the business increases. This can be either through continued development of the IT strategy, or acquisition of other companies with different systems. For any business there is a real requirement to link these systems. Web services and Web service orchestration offer a secure, accessible, scalable and future-proof mechanism for system communication. This linking of disparate systems within a company’s IT strategy contributes towards a key SOA strategy. Generally, a company’s IT strategy is arranged and organised by high-level business managers; not technical IT officers. Due to the fact that SOA implementations are generally a very technical implementation, business personnel are unable to get heavily involved in the process at the present time. This paper presents the concepts behind Service Oriented Architectures and Web service orchestration. A custom software tool for developing SOA strategies via BPEL and Web service orchestration is outlined towards the end of the paper. Based on an established modelling tool, the SOA add-in is capable of producing complex SOA strategies for a company’s IT department. This tool is pitched at a sufficient level for semi-technical business managers to be able to utilise it in an efficient manner. This moves away from the traditional low-level design being carried out by highly skilled IT professionals. We also discuss potential future improvements to the BPEL standard.