BPEL 2.0, the long-awaited love-child of the OASIS WS-BPEL TC, is at last in its final public comment phase. See John Evdemon’s blog for all the links. Sure, conventional wisdom says two years is a long time to change Switch to If-then, but if Assaf’s comments are correct, fixing BPEL 1.1′s primitive data manipulation syntax may prove to be a far more significant change. Once the thing is finally approved we can anticipate a ripple effect on BPMSes, and a round of new questions. Will Microsoft actually support it? (Unlikely.) Will there be an actual spec submitted for BPEL4People and BPEL-Subprocess? (Probably, but will anyone but IBM and SAP care?) Will BPMN have to change to support the new BPEL? (Bigger problems than that confront BPMN.) Once BPEL 2.0 is approved by a vote in OASIS, I think it has 6 months to prove it was worth waiting for. If it can’t do it, I think the energy on standardization moves to the modeling language (BPMN?) and the execution language becomes an implementation detail.
So what’s the scoop with rules in BPEL?
BPEL doesn’t deal with rules at all, as far as I know. Unless you call IF (expression)… [do this block of activities] a “rule.”