Book Review : WS-BPEL 2.0 for SOA Composite Applications with Oracle SOA Suite 11g

Posted on Monday, 13 June 2011 by Eric Elzinga

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Already read this book a while ago, but never had the time to do a short review on it.
After reading ‘Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1 Developer’s Guide’ i was still hoping to read some new refreshing information.

BPEL 2.0 is fairly new for me. Read about the specs, but never had much of a chance to get in touch with it for development purpose.
The book mentions most of the “what’s new changes” spread around in several chapters in the book. I would rather have some sort of short overview in the book what mentions me what’s new in this version of BPEL, how did we do it in BPEL 1.0. Like this the reader will have a better overview of what BPEL 2.0 will give him for extra functionality.

The ‘Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1 Developer’s Guide‘ book was more of a global overview book with not a lot of in-dept information.
From this point of view this book gives use more in-dept information and more ‘advanced’ information about the possibilities of BPEL (1.0/2.0) in conjunction with the SOA Suite, so they’re both complementary.

Since i have a strong background both on OSB en SOA Suite, i’m always looking for some sort of best practice on what to model in SOA Suite and what to model in the OSB.
The authors added a nice chapter on the Oracle Service Bus and the use of the Oracle Registry. Too bad they didn’t add some extra information to the debat to decide where to technically implement which components of your business process. But i can imagine this would also be out of scope for this book.

To finish off the book the authors give us 2 chapters to show the possiblities the Oracle products give us to connect BPEL with BPMN.
Chapter 10 gives discusses the round-tripping of BPEL to BPMN and back by use of the BPA Suite product and the Oracle SOA Suite.
And chapter 11 shows us how to integrate the composite applications with BPMN processes by use of the BPM Suite. Again a well explained example, so the reader gets a good overview on the integration of the BPMN process into your composite.

Chapters

The first Chapter (Introduction to BPEL and SOA) gives us a overview of both concepts, which standards are available and are getting used in the products.
Chapter 2 (Service Composition with BPEL) starts with ‘beginners’ information about the available BPEL activities. The following chapters like (Advanced BPEL, BPEL Extensions, Entity Variables, Master Detail processes) will discuss the more advanced topics on BPEL (both activities defined by the standard and the oracle-specific implementations).
Chapter 8 (Monitoring BPEL Processes with BAM), chapter 9 (BPEL with Oracle Service BUs and Service Registry) and the chapters 10 (BPMN to BPEL Round-tripping with BPA Suite and SOA Suite) en 11 (Integration BPEL with BPMN using BPM Suite) all discuss the intergration with other products of the Oracle portfolio. All well explained and with examples. So for the reader it’s nice to see how easily one can integrate with the other products.

Overall it was a good read. It gave me a bit of advanced and in-dept information, good examples (easily to follow by just clicking what is mention in it).
Looking at the title of the book i would expect more of the BPEL 2.0 part. It doesn’t get much highlighted in the book, although a lot of the new specs are mention through the whole book, so you really need to read the specs to see what is changed in the 2.0 definitons.
Although i do just read the content of the ‘Appendix A’ on the Packt site (WS-BPEL 2.0 Syntax Reference), nice list of the available functions.
See this link.

A while back i also followed a 3day BPMN training on the Oracle BPMN Suite, so the BPMN chapters (especially the last one) were a nice rephrase on what we learned on the training.

Content

Table of Contents

Preface
Chapter 1: Introduction to BPEL and SOA
Chapter 2: Service Composition with BPEL
Chapter 3: Advanced BPEL
Chapter 4: Using BPEL with Oracle SOA Suite 11g
Chapter 5: BPEL Extensions, Dynamic Parallel Flow, Dynamic Partner Links, Notification Service, Java Embedding, and Fault Management Framework
Chapter 6: Entity Variables, Master and Detail Processes, Security, and Business Events in BPEL
Chapter 7: Human Interactions in BPEL
Chapter 8: Monitoring BPEL Processes with BAM
Chapter 9: BPEL with Oracle Service Bus and Service Registry
Chapter 10: BPMN to BPEL Round-tripping with BPA Suite and SOA Suite
Chapter 11: Integrating BPEL with BPMN using BPM Suite
Appendix A
Appendix B
Index