2007-04-06

The World is Flat

I've just finished reading "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman.
I highly recommend it, as it (finally) puts globalization in a constructive perspective and is a very entertaining read.

2007-04-05

BPEL in a workflow perspective

BPEL stands for Business Process Execution Language
It is a standard, originally proposed by Microsoft and IBM, that is orchestration-based, meaning that the business process is represented by a graph, whose vertices are activities and edges are control and data flows, allowing for the composition of web services.

In a "workflow" system perspective, you can say that BPEL is the "flow", whereas the composed web services are the "work", meaning that the bulk of the processing is done by the web services (ex. complex algorithms, database accesses, etc.) while BPEL is more suited to do web service invocations.