Well has it happens, on the day where I wrote my first post of this subject, Ismael Ghalimi added a post of his own on XPDL and “Why XPDL is essentially useless”[1].
In this post, he explains why he thinks that the XPDL standard is interesting, but not as useful as it could have been. In essence, the XPDL standard is used to describe how a business process model is saved in a format that makes it possible to exchange between products, but it lacks the ability to standardize the executable portion of the diagram which then makes it impossible to exchange the executable pieces from one product to another. In his words:
“As such, it cannot be used to store and exchange fully executable processes, but rather skeletons of processes to which muscles must be added for them to run.”
In other words, the standard does not prevent vendor lock in (which is one of the main reasons why customers want this compatibility in the first place) because the executable pieces of the process will be vendor specific.
Based on his article, the combination of BPMN and BPEL is the only way to actually avoid some of the vendor lock in. BPEL (although it has limited BPMN support) does allow for some vendors to be able to exchange the executable processes.
So contrary to what I was saying in my previous post, Is BPEL Obsolete? Maybe not after all. I guess we will have to wait and see how all of these standards evolve.
[1] Why XPDL is essentially useless by Ismael Ghalimi
Tags: BPM