However, anyone questioning Oracle’s commitment to the spec will be reassured by Steve Harris, VP of Oracle’s Java Platform Group, who told Computer Business Review: Although we have a heavy investment in human workflow, it has been fairly consistent with BPEL4People. There is no disconnect between that and where we will be going, and no technical bifurcation.

The question was raised because the spec was originally developed by IBM and SAP, the latter being Oracle’s chief rival in the enterprise applications space. When IBM and SAP produced the original BPEL4People spec in a white paper, it was noted that Oracle at that time seemed to be favoring using BPEL’s standard invoke mechanism and external task management service.

That fear now seems unfounded as Oracle was amongst those putting their name the day before yesterday behind the BPEL4People spec, which the consortium of vendors said would be submitted to standards body OASIS for ratification as a proper standard imminently.

Also putting their names behind the spec were Active Endpoints, Adobe, BEA Systems, and as you would expect, IBM and SAP.

Our View

The vendors behind it said BPEL4People extends the capabilities of BPEL to support a broad range of human interaction patterns, allowing for expanded modeling of business processes within the BPEL language.

BPEL itself is a standard already ratified by OASIS that handles the execution of business processes in a services oriented architecture or SOA. It is an XML-based standard for specifying business processes and business process integration, and indeed one that many customers are already using in anger.

But missing from BPEL was a way to easily specify human interactions that so often form part of a business process. BPEL4People seeks to redress that omission, though users should be mindful that until it is ratified by OASIS as a proper standard, it remains a specification, a work in progress.