A BPEL engine and visual editor for the .NET framework

Abstract

In today's world of extreme competition on the business front, information exchange and efficient communication is the need of the day. This need for information exchange brings in another need to make this information selectively visible, and its visibility to be changed on the fly. Web Services are a new breed of web application and play a central role in the WWW, providing the above mentioned requirements. The composition of these services is an emerging paradigm for enabling application integration within and across organisational boundaries. A landscape of languages and techniques for web services composition has emerged and is continuously being enriched with new proposals from different vendors and coalitions. The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS or BPEL for short) is an XML based scripting language intended to enable portable business process definitions for WSDL based business processes. An engine for this scripting language already exists and runs over a Java enabled web server. The aim of this project is to provide an engine that would allow the execution of BPEL processes, running over the .NET framework, together with a Visual Editor through which a BPEL process could be easily created, hiding from the inexperienced user the markup comprised by the language.