Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Open Source BPEL Over the last few months a number of Apache projects started on the next level of Web service protocols - Apache Sandesha based on the unsubmitted IBM/MS WS-ReliableMessaging specification, Apache Addressing based on the unsubmitted IBM/MS WS-Addressing specification, WSS4J based OASIS WS-Security and lastly WSRP4J based on OASIS WSRP - Web Services for Remote Portlets. These efforts were clearly a harbinger for the BPEL space. Today Tug Grall pointed me at an open source BPEL implementation he found - Twister, put out in mid-March.  Paul Brown mentioned OpenBPEL as another example in the space arriving sometime back in February.  Clearly early days if you download either one, but some serious initial effort appears to be underway. This should be seen as a "good thing" because the more public BPEL implementations there are the clearer the ambiguities in the specifications/standards become. It becomes more viable for groups like the WS-I to conceive and arrive at reasonable interoperability scenarios against a range of implementations.  We also get to see a bit of how the different implementations will go about differentiating themselves in the face of some initial commoditization of the standard.  comment [] 11:03:30 PM