Book review: Business Process Execution Language

Title: Business Process Execution Language
Author: Matjaz B. Juric, Benny Mathew, Poornachandra Sarang
Published by: Packt Publishing
ISBN: 1-904811018-3
Publication Date: 2004
Details: 270pages, $59.99; www.packtpub.com

I recently read this nice book about the growing BPEL standard. The book gives a fairly good overview about what BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) is. The different technologies and standards surrounding web services are explained before the chapters about BPEL start. That introduction introduces the reader quickly into the world of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture).

The following chapter explains the BPEL language with a lot of examples. You should be able to understand the generated BPEL code that design tools generate.

The book ends with a description of the BPEL tools from Oracle and Microsoft. These chapters give you a nive overview of the possibilities of both tools. The Oracle chapter even touches the Java API which can be used to interact with the BPEL engine. This is not standard BPEL functionality, but it really shows the strength of the Oracle product.

My conclusion is that this book gives a nice introduction into the world of SOA and BPEL. It’s short, just 270 pages, so it will not take much time to introduce the reader to the BPEL standard. The book is a good starting point for everyone that wants to take up the BPEL standard.