BPMI.org confirms plans to expand BPEL

As seen on Computer Business Online - BPEL to expand

BPMI.org board member Derek Miers confirmed in an interview with ComputerWire that the standards body is working on what it is calling Business Process eXtension Layers (BPXL), a standard that would help to enable interoperability between process modeling tools and process management engines.

"We need to do this because it is clear that going through the OASIS Technical Committee process that developed BPEL would be too much of a long, drawn-out process," said Miers. "It took nine months just to get to where we are with BPEL. Without it [the new BPXL plans], there is a whole range of things that BPEL does not address. Things like human collaboration, tasks, longer running processes, transaction roll-back and the like. The OASIS Technical Committee process is just going to be too slow to address that."

I agree that BPEL has some deficiencies -- notably the one's mentioned in this article and a few more. Future versions of BPEL will tackle these issues, no doubt. My concern is with these parallel extensions. Where are we headed in the standards soup ? The current web services stack is quite complicated as it is.