According to this article, those considering SOA may have some tough choices when it comes to driving code at the process layer. Indeed, a report by the Burton Group describes both the limitations of BPEL, and the advantages of WS-CDL. "Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is the standard developers must use for Web services orchestration, but it is a limited standard and will eventually be subordinated to According to this article, those considering SOA may have some tough choices when it comes to driving code at the process layer. Indeed, a report by the Burton Group describes both the limitations of BPEL, and the advantages of WS-CDL.“Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is the standard developers must use for Web services orchestration, but it is a limited standard and will eventually be subordinated to Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL), argues Chris Howard, the Burton vice president who authored the report.” “BPEL’s limitations are covered at length in Howard’s detailed report, “Crossing the Divide: The Mechanics of Process Execution.”One of the most interesting things in the report:“For the process execution component of business process management (BPM), he notes that BPEL has vendor support in tooling for Web services orchestration. But one of the limitations he mentions is that even in the updated BPEL 2.0 standard, which is expected to be finalized by OASIS this summer, ‘it still performs orchestration from the perspective of a single service.’ This is not adequate for maturing SOA implementations requiring choreography of multiple services, he argues.”Last year I pointed out the limitation of BPEL 2.0, including the issues mentioned the Burton report. The truth of the matter is that WS-CDL is not perfect, but in comparing the standards, the limitations of BPEL 2.0 are apparent. So apparent that I don’t understand why those creating the standard don’t step up and fix them considering that BPEL is the standard that I deal with the most in my practice. Also, the standards that most of the vendors employ. Once again, we have Beta and VHS decisions to make, or should I say Hi Def DVD or BluRay. I know that one won’t be around after a few years. Software Development