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39-539: The Web Services Business Process Execution Language ( WS-BPEL ), commonly known as BPEL ( Business Process Execution Language ), is an OASIS standard executable language for specifying actions within business processes with web services . Processes in BPEL export and import information by using web service interfaces exclusively. One can describe Web-service interactions in two ways: as executable business processes and as abstract business processes. WS-BPEL aims to model

78-489: A GOTO statement. Nassi–Shneiderman diagrams are only rarely used for formal programming. Their abstraction level is close to structured program code and modifications require the whole diagram to be redrawn, but graphic editors removed that limitation. They clarify algorithms and high-level designs, which make them useful in teaching. They were included in Microsoft Visio and dozens of other software tools, such as

117-403: A RAND clause in its policy, welcomed the initiative and supposed OASIS will not continue using that policy as other companies involved would follow. The RAND policy has still not been removed and other commercial companies have not published such a free statement towards OASIS. Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS from 2001 to 2008, minimized the risk that a company could take advantage of

156-535: A WS-BPEL extension to address human interactions in WS-BPEL as a first-class citizen . It defines a new type of basic activity which uses human tasks as an implementation, and allows specifying tasks local to a process or use tasks defined outside of the process definition. This extension is based on the WS-HumanTask specification. Version 2.0 introduced some changes and new features: OASIS (organization) OASIS

195-512: A blog post blaming Microsoft of involving people to improve and modify the accuracy of ODF and OpenXML Misplaced Pages articles. Nassi%E2%80%93Shneiderman diagram A Nassi–Shneiderman diagram (NSD) in computer programming is a graphical design representation for structured programming . This type of diagram was developed in 1972 by Isaac Nassi and Ben Shneiderman who were both graduate students at Stony Brook University . These diagrams are also called structograms , as they show

234-443: A looping procedure stopping the program from continuing until a condition has been fulfilled. The second type of branching block is a multiple branching block. This block is used when a select case is needed in a program. The block usually contains a question or select case. The block provides the program with an array of choices and is often used in conjunction with sub process blocks to save space. Testing loops: this block allows

273-1112: A new set of specifications for electronic business. The joint initiative, called " ebXML " and which first met in November 1999, was chartered for a three-year period. At the final meeting under the original charter, in Vienna, UN/CEFACT and OASIS agreed to divide the remaining work between the two organizations and to coordinate the completion of the work through a coordinating committee. In 2004 OASIS submitted its completed ebXML specifications to ISO TC154 where they were approved as ISO 15000 . The consortium has its headquarters in Woburn, Massachusetts , shared with other companies. In December 2020, OASIS moved to its current location, 400 TradeCenter Drive. Previous office locations include 25 Corporate Drive Suite 103 and 35 Corporate Drive, Suite 150, both in Burlington, MA. The following standards are under development or maintained by OASIS technical committees: Adhesion to

312-450: A program's structures. Following a top-down design , the problem at hand is reduced into smaller and smaller subproblems, until only simple statements and control flow constructs remain. Nassi–Shneiderman diagrams reflect this top-down decomposition in a straightforward way, using nested boxes to represent subproblems. Consistent with the philosophy of structured programming, Nassi–Shneiderman diagrams have no representation for

351-448: A sine-qua-non condition to access the consortium, and possibly jeopardize/boycott the standard if such a clause was not present. Doug Mahugh — while working for Microsoft (a promoter of Office Open XML , a Microsoft document format competing with OASIS's ISO/IEC 26300 , i.e. ODF v1.0) — claimed that "many countries have expressed frustration about the pace of OASIS's responses to defect reports that have been submitted on ISO/IEC 26300 and

390-450: A standard to request royalties when it has been established, saying "If it's an option nobody uses, then what's the harm?" . Sam Hiser, former marketing lead of the now defunct OpenOffice.org , explained that such patents towards an open standard are counterproductive and inappropriate. He also argued that IBM and Microsoft were shifting their standardization efforts from the W3C to OASIS, in

429-511: A substantially different business process modeling language, namely Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), as a graphical front-end to capture BPEL process descriptions. As an illustration of the feasibility of this approach, the BPMN specification includes an informal and partial mapping from BPMN to BPEL 1.1. A more detailed mapping of BPMN to BPEL has been implemented in a number of tools, including an open-source tool known as BPMN2BPEL. However,

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468-503: A way to leverage probably their patents portfolio in the future. Hiser also attributed this RAND change to the OASIS policy to Microsoft. The RAND term could indeed allow any company involved to leverage their patent in the future, but that amendment was probably added in a way to attract more companies to the consortium, and encourage contributions from potential participants. Big actors like Microsoft could have indeed applied pressure and made

507-451: Is an effort related to JSR 207 that may enable Java to function as a 'programming in the small' language within BPEL. Despite wide acceptance of Web services in distributed business applications, the absence of human interactions was a significant gap for many real-world business processes. To fill this gap, BPEL4People extended BPEL from orchestration of Web services alone to orchestration of role-based human activities as well. Within

546-518: The BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask specifications, which describe how human interaction in BPEL processes can be implemented. There were ten original design goals associated with BPEL: BPEL is an orchestration language, and not a choreography language. The primary difference between orchestration and choreography is executability and control. An orchestration specifies an executable process that involves message exchanges with other systems, such that

585-507: The German EasyCODE. In Germany, Nassi–Shneiderman diagrams were standardised in 1985 as DIN 66261. They are still used in German introductions to programming, for example Böttcher and Kneißl's introduction to C, Baeumle-Courth and Schmidt's introduction to C and Kirch's introduction to C#. Nassi–Shneiderman diagrams can also be used in technical writing . Process blocks:

624-542: The OASIS WS-BPEL technical committee voted on 14 September 2004 to name their spec "WS-BPEL 2.0". (This change in name aligned BPEL with other web service standard naming conventions which start with "WS-" (similar to WS-Security) and took account of the significant enhancements made between BPEL4WS 1.1 and WS-BPEL 2.0.) If not discussing a specific version, the moniker BPEL is commonly used. In June 2007, Active Endpoints, Adobe Systems , BEA, IBM, Oracle, and SAP published

663-450: The OASIS technical committee decided this was out of scope. Some vendors have invented their own notations. These notations take advantage of the fact that most constructs in BPEL are block-structured (e.g., sequence, while, pick, scope, etcetera.) This feature enables a direct visual representation of BPEL process descriptions in the form of structograms , in a style reminiscent of a Nassi–Shneiderman diagram . Others have proposed to use

702-465: The behavior of processes, via a language for the specification of both Executable and Abstract Business Processes. By doing so, it extends the Web Services interaction model and enables it to support business transactions. It also defines an interoperable integration model that should facilitate the expansion of automated process integration both within and between businesses. Its development came out of

741-414: The block it tests to see if the condition is fulfilled, then, if it is not completes the process blocks and then loops back. The test is performed again and, if the condition is still unfulfilled, it processes again. If at any stage the condition is fulfilled the program skips the process blocks and continues onto the next block. The test last block is simply reversed, the process blocks are completed before

780-443: The consortium requires some fees to be paid, which must be renewed annually, depending on the membership category adherents want to access. Among the adherents are members from Dell , IBM , ISO/IEC , Cisco Systems , KDE e.V. , Microsoft , Oracle , Red Hat , The Document Foundation , universities, government agencies, individuals and employees from other less-known companies. Member sections are special interest groups within

819-454: The consortium that focus on specific topics. These sections keep their own distinguishable identity and have full autonomy to define their work program and agenda. The integration of the member section in the standardization process is organized via the technical committees. Active member sections are for example: Member sections may be completed when they have achieved their objectives. The standards that they promoted are then maintained by

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858-488: The context of a business process BPEL4People by extending BPEL with additional independent syntax and semantic. The WS-HumanTask specification introduces the definition of human tasks and notifications, including their properties, behavior and a set of operations used to manipulate human tasks. A coordination protocol is introduced in order to control autonomy and life cycle of service-enabled human tasks in an interoperable manner. The BPEL4People specification introduces

897-409: The development of these tools has exposed fundamental differences between BPMN and BPEL, which make it very difficult, and in some cases impossible, to generate human-readable BPEL code from BPMN models. Even more difficult is the problem of BPMN-to-BPEL round-trip engineering : generating BPEL code from BPMN diagrams and maintaining the original BPMN model and the generated BPEL code synchronized, in

936-486: The form of a BPEL process) for each peer involved in it. The orchestration and the choreography distinctions are based on analogies: orchestration refers to the central control (by the conductor) of the behavior of a distributed system (the orchestra consisting of many players), while choreography refers to a distributed system (the dancing team) which operates according to rules (the choreography) but without centralized control. BPEL's focus on modern business processes, plus

975-488: The growing success of BPMI.org and the open BPMS movement led by JBoss and Intalio Inc., IBM and Microsoft decided to combine these languages into a new language, BPEL4WS. In April 2003, BEA Systems , IBM, Microsoft, SAP , and Siebel Systems submitted BPEL4WS 1.1 to OASIS for standardization via the Web Services BPEL Technical Committee. Although BPEL4WS appeared as both a 1.0 and 1.1 version,

1014-511: The histories of WSFL and XLANG, led BPEL to adopt web services as its external communication mechanism. Thus BPEL's messaging facilities depend on the use of the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1 to describe outgoing and incoming messages. In addition to providing facilities to enable sending and receiving messages, the BPEL programming language also supports: There is no standard graphical notation for WS-BPEL, as

1053-541: The inability for SC 34 members to participate in the maintenance of ODF." However, Rob Weir, co-chair of the OASIS ODF Technical Committee noted that at the time, "the ODF TC had received zero defect reports from any ISO/IEC national body other than Japan". He added that the submitter of the original Japanese defect report, Murata Mokoto, was satisfied with the preparation of the errata. He also self-published

1092-405: The large " languages: WSFL ( Web Services Flow Language ) and Xlang , respectively. Microsoft even went ahead and created a scripting variant called XLANG/s which would later serve as the basis for their Orchestrations services inside their BizTalk Server. They specifically documented that this language "is proprietary and is not fully documented." With the advent and popularity of BPML , and

1131-442: The message exchange sequences are controlled by the orchestration designer. A choreography specifies a protocol for peer-to-peer interactions, defining, e.g., the legal sequences of messages exchanged with the purpose of guaranteeing interoperability. Such a protocol is not directly executable, as it allows many different realizations (processes that comply with it). A choreography can be realized by writing an orchestration (e.g., in

1170-418: The movement of the industry to XML , SGML Open changed its emphasis from SGML to XML, and changed its name to OASIS Open to be inclusive of XML and reflect an expanded scope of technical work and standards. The focus of the consortium's activities also moved from promoting adoption (as XML was getting much attention on its own) to developing technical specifications. In July 2000 a new technical committee process

1209-635: The notion that programming in the large and programming in the small required different types of languages. As such, it is serialized in XML and aims to enable programming in the large. The concepts of programming in the large and programming in the small distinguish between two aspects of writing the type of long-running asynchronous processes that one typically sees in business processes: The origins of WS-BPEL go back to Web Services Flow Language (WSFL) and Xlang . In 2001, IBM and Microsoft had each defined their own fairly similar, " programming in

Business Process Execution Language - Misplaced Pages Continue

1248-449: The possibility of free / open source implementations of these standards. Further, contributors could initially offer royalty-free use of their patent, later imposing per-unit fees, after the standard has been accepted. On April 11, 2005, The New York Times reported IBM committed, for free, all of its patents to the OASIS group. Larry Rosen, a software law expert and the leader of the reaction which rose up when OASIS quietly included

1287-438: The process block represents the simplest of steps and requires no analysis. When a process block is encountered, the action inside the block is performed and we move onto the next block. Branching blocks: there are two types of branching blocks. First is the simple True/False or Yes/No branching block which offers the program two paths to take depending on whether or not a condition has been fulfilled. These blocks can be used as

1326-416: The program to loop one or a set of processes until a particular condition is fulfilled. The process blocks covered by each loop are subset with a side-bar extending out from the condition. There are two main types of testing loops, test first and test last blocks. The only difference between the two is the order in which the steps involved are completed. In the test first situation, when the program encounters

1365-534: The relevant technical committees directly within OASIS. For example: Like many bodies producing open standards e.g. ECMA , OASIS added a Reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing (RAND) clause to its policy in February 2005. That amendment required participants to disclose intent to apply for software patents for technologies under consideration in the standard. Contrary to the W3C , which requires participants to offer royalty-free licenses to anyone using

1404-551: The resulting standard, OASIS offers a similar Royalty Free on Limited Terms mode, along with a Royalty Free on RAND Terms mode and a RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) mode for its committees. Compared to W3C, OASIS is less restrictive regarding obligation to companies to grant a royalty-free license to the patents they own. Controversy has rapidly arisen because this licensing was added silently and allows publication of standards which could require licensing fee payments to patent holders. This situation could effectively eliminate

1443-445: The sense that any modification to one is propagated to the other. BPEL's control structures such as 'if-then-elseif-else' and 'while' as well as its variable manipulation facilities depend on the use of 'programming in the small' languages to provide logic. All BPEL implementations must support XPath 1.0 as a default language. But the design of BPEL envisages extensibility so that systems builders can use other languages as well. BPELJ

1482-456: Was approved. With the adoption of the process the manner in which technical committees were created, operated, and progressed their work was regularized. At the adoption of the process there were five technical committees; by 2004 there were nearly 70 . During 1999, OASIS was approached by UN/CEFACT , the committee of the United Nations dealing with standards for business, to jointly develop

1521-484: Was founded under the name "SGML Open" in 1993. It began as a trade association of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) tool vendors to cooperatively promote the adoption of SGML through mainly educational activities, though some amount of technical activity was also pursued including an update of the CALS Table Model specification and specifications for fragment interchange and entity management. In 1998, with

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