BPEL4Chor: Extending BPEL for Modeling Choreographies

Abstract

The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is a language to orchestrate web services into a single business process. In a choreography view, several processes are interconnected and their interaction behavior is described from a global perspective. This paper shows how BPEL can be extended for defining choreographies. The proposed extensions (BPEL4Chor) distinguish between three aspects: (i) participant behavior descriptions, i.e. control flow dependencies in each participant, (ii) the participant topology, i.e. the existing participants and their interconnection using message links and (iii) participant groundings, i.e. concrete configurations for data formats and port types. As BPEL itself is used unchanged, the extensions facilitate a seamless integration between service choreographies and orchestrations. The suitability of the extensions is validated by assessing their support for the Service Interaction Patterns.

Approach and Refinement Strategies for Flexible Choreography Enactment

“…The abstract containers represent the source and the target of the communication link connecting the involved choreography participants. If one participant has to send messages to more than one participant, this is not modeled by an abstract connector but rather the choreography language itself has to provide means for expressing a set of participants whose number is not known at design time [9]. An abstract connector can be modeled between sending and receiving participants (or sets of them) in order to postpone the decision about the MEP to be used.…”

“…As a basis for a CDC system modeling tool we use our ChorDesigner [26] as choreography editor and we have chosen BPEL4Chor [9] as the choreography language to serialize the choreographies in. BPEL4Chor forms a layer on top of BPEL and specifies the participants of a choreography, their communication behavior and the message links between them.…”

“…Furthermore, we present a prototypical implementation of our approach (Sec. 4), which includes the extension of the choreography language BPEL4Chor [9] and the workflow language BPEL [18], and evaluate the approach in a case study. The paper is concluded with a summary and outlook to future work (Sec.…”

Bridging the Gap between Business Processes and Service Composition through Service Choreographies

“…There has been other language proposals, mostly developed in research projects. In [8] Decker et al introduce BPEL4Chor [7] and survey some other choreography language proposals as Let's Dance [20] or iBPMN [5], an extension of BPMN adapted to choreographies. But this concept is still far to be standardized and adopted by the industry.…”

Model Transformations to Leverage Service Networks

“…Executable business processes are technology-dependent, and are usually modeled using languages such as the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) and BPEL4Chor [11], respectively focusing on orchestrations and choreographies. The Services layer provides the set of discrete services available in the service network, relying on open standards based message backbone, enabled by SOC infrastructural plumbing technologies such as an Enterprise Service Bus [12].…”