BPEL4People

Det händer saker i standardiseringsprocessen, tyvärr ser jag inte många spår av microsoft i detta forum (däremot mycket IBM, Oracle och SAP). Som jag tidigare postat info om så finns det lite BPEL-stöd i WorkflowFoundation men vem det hur det kommer att utvecklas i framtiden.

För er som vill hålla er informerade om det senaste finns en bra artikel här

Här kommer en liten kort sammanfattning om bakgrunden

Web Services Business Process Execution Language, version 2.0 (WS-BPEL 2.0 or
BPEL for brevity) introduces a model for business processes based on Web services.
A BPEL process orchestrates interactions among different Web services. The
language encompasses features needed to describe complex control flows, including
error handling and compensation behavior. In practice, however many business
process scenarios require human interactions. A process definition should incorporate
people as another type of participants, because humans may also take part in
business processes and can influence the process execution.
This specification introduces a BPEL extension to address human interactions in 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.

Human tasks, or briefly tasks enable the integration of human beings in service-
oriented applications. This document provides a notation, state diagram and API for
human tasks, as well as a coordination protocol that allows interaction with human
tasks in a more service-oriented fashion and at the same time controls tasks’
autonomy. The document is called Web Services Human Task (abbreviated to WS-
HumanTask for the rest of this document). 
Human tasks are services “implemented” by people. They allow the integration of
humans in service-oriented applications. A human task has two interfaces. One
interface exposes the service offered by the task, like a translation service or an
approval service. The second interface allows people to deal with tasks, for example
to query for human tasks waiting for them, and to work on these tasks. 
A human task has people assigned to it. These assignments define who should be
allowed to play a certain role on that task. Human tasks may also specify how task
metadata should be rendered on different devices or applications making them
portable and interoperable with different types of software. Human tasks can be
defined to react on timeouts, triggering an apropriate escalation action. 
This also holds true for notifications. Notifications are a special type of human task
that allows the sending of information about noteworthy business events to people.
Notifications are always oneway, i.e., they are delivered in a fire-and-forget manner:
The sender pushes out notifications to people without waiting for these people to
acknowledge their receipt.