In this chapter, we have become familiar with BPEL, its role in the SOA, and basic concepts related to service composition and the definition of business processes. BPEL provides a rich vocabulary for defining processes and has several features not found in programming languages. This makes BPEL the preferred choice for composition of services. Major software vendors support BPEL and open source implementations exist. Based on comparison to other technologies and languages, we have seen that BPEL plays an important role in service composition.

BPEL fits very well into the SOA, and with BPEL, we can define executable business processes and abstract business processes. Executable processes are the most important and allow us to define the exact order in which services are composed.

In the next chapter, we will look at BPEL and learn how to define a BPEL process.