BPEL conformance in open source engines

Abstract

More than five years have passed since the final release of the long-desired OASIS standard of a process language for Web Services orchestration, the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). The aim of this standard was to establish a universally accepted Web Services orchestration language that forms a core part of service-oriented architectures and, because of standardization, avoids vendor lock-in. By now, several fully conformant engines should have arrived in the market. It is our aim to shed light on this situation and to provide a comprehensive picture of the current state of BPEL support. We present an evaluation of the standard conformance of five open source BPEL engines. To obtain these results we have developed betsy, a tool that allows for a fully-automatic standard conformance testing of BPEL engines. The results demonstrate that full standard conformance in contemporary engines is still far from given.