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Windows Workflow Foundation and BPEL  
# Wednesday, February 28, 2007
 
Two things are worth pointing out about Microsoft's recent announcement of BPEL support in Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). First, it's not a surprise. The company has been talking about its intent to do this since WF went public in the fall of 2005. The only real surprise is that it's taking so long.

This delay is probably indicative of the second point, which is that no one should interpret the announcement as an embrace of BPEL-based development by Microsoft. True, WF's BPEL activities will let developers create workflows that can be directly exported as standard BPEL. But the developer sees those workflows in the usual WF way, i.e., as .NET-based code, rather than as XML-based BPEL. Similarly, any imported BPEL workflows will be converted into WF's internal representation. Like BizTalk Server today, WF treats BPEL as a way to move process logic between different workflow engines, not as an executable format (and certainly not as a development language).

If the popularity of BPEL in BizTalk is any indication, we shouldn't expect widespread use of WF's BPEL support. I very rarely run across organizations that are using BPEL with BizTalk Server today, and I remain skeptical about BPEL ever achieving widespread popularity. Adding the ability to export and import BPEL workflows to WF--and thus to Windows itself--will help WF in situations where support for BPEL is a political necessity. Yet I'll be surprised if it becomes a widely used aspect of WF applications.


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Comments:

Microsoft are definitely on the BPEL train and actually are better with WF, which can be looked as a superset of BPEL.

In fact what are Microsoft internally doing now is merging the WF and WCF teams and building the next generation framework for business applications, which in standards body will be represented in WS-BPEL 2.0.
# posted by Stefan Dobrev : March 19, 2007 5:47 AM
 

I guess this depends on what "on the BPEL train" actually means. Microsoft definitely isn't on the same BPEL train as Oracle, for example. Oracle's BPEL Process Manager has developers working directly in BPEL when the graphical tool isn't enough. Rather than viewing BPEL as an import/export format, as Microsoft does, they see it as a language that people should learn and use directly (at least in some cases).

I'd also argue strongly that viewing WF as a superset of BPEL is inaccurate. WF's Basic Activity Library is in many ways functionally similar to BPEL, but you need know nothing at all about BPEL to work with it. BPEL-based products and WF can address some of the same problems, but their approaches are different in significant ways.

And finally, WS-BPEL 2.0 isn't really comparable to the union of WF and WCF. Apart from the functional differences, which are huge, Microsoft's approach depends on CLR-based languages rather than the XML-based BPEL. This is an important distinction, since I can't make myself believe that most developers will ever be happy working in a clumsy XML-based language. Using BPEL purely as a format for exchanging process definitions makes much more sense than trying to create those definitions directly in this difficult language.
# posted by David Chappell : March 23, 2007 12:32 PM
 

Given that BizTalk only uses BPEL for import/export of logic, perhaps the lack of popularity of BPEL in the BizTalk world might be related to the fact that the BizTalk BPEL import is so buggy and problematical.
# posted by Rich Adams : June 23, 2007 10:15 PM
 

This is a good point, Rich--BizTalk's BPEL import/export certainly could be better. Still, I'm skeptical that improving this would greatly increase the use of this feature. BPEL just isn't a widely used technology today.

WF's BPEL support looks to be significantly better than what's in BizTalk today. Given that the next major BizTalk release will use WF, it's reasonable to one day expect better BPEL support in BizTalk.
# posted by David Chappell : June 25, 2007 10:22 AM
 

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