News

Oracle Jumps Onboard BPEL Effort

• By Kathleen Ohlson
• July 5, 2005

Oracle recently proposed it will lead the Eclipse Foundation’s tooling project for Business Process Execution Language. BPEL helps simplify the development of service-oriented architecture applications, consequently helping to reduce cost, complexity and inflexibility of integration projects. The standard would allow developers to tighten the integration of Web services and business processes.

As the proposed project lead, Oracle would help build an open-source BPEL tool under the Eclipse Public License. The tool would be based on technology that is currently included in Oracle’s BPEL Process Manager and BPEL Designer, Oracle’s BPEL tool for mapping business process flows.

The BPEL Process Manager includes an engine for executing business processes, a console to monitor, manage and debug business processes, and a graphical interface to design and build business process; it runs on top of all major J2EE compatible application servers. The tool allows companies to implement adaptive transactions and collaborative business processes based on composite applications.

“BPEL is one of the most important standards required for the development of enterprise SOA applications,” says Edwin Khodabakchian, Oracle’s vice president of software development. “This project combined with our [Enterprise Java Beans] 3.0 and JSF tooling projects for Eclipse developers positions Oracle as a leader in making key SOA-related technologies and standards available to all developers regardless of which development environment they choose.”

This announcement follows several bits of Oracle news out of this year’s JavaOne Conference. Oracle is proposing to lead another JSF tooling project for Eclipse developers, building on its EJB 3.0 tooling project and offering the JSF framework to more developers. The company expects to make the functionality of JSF and EJB 3.0 Eclipse projects available with the JDeveloper tool.

Oracle also announced it would give away its JDeveloper 10g Java IDE to developers in the hopes of boosting its adoption and increasing interest in Oracle’s Fusion Middleware projects.