Business process definition languages versus traditional methods towards interoperability

Abstract

A business process is a collection of activities that are required to achieve a business goal and it is represented with an activity flow that specifies the orchestration needed to complete the goal. The definition of these processes allows business people to easily integrate the functionalities of the COTS in the company to support the business objectives. This activity flow can be implemented in two ways, using traditional methods or using a Business Process Definition Language (BPDL). Traditional methods encode the activity flow using state of the art programming languages such as Java, C#, etc. BPDLs describe the activity flow with a specific language that is directly interpreted by a BPDL engine. This paper analyses the use of BPDLs and traditional methods to develop solutions for services-based architectures. It presents a case study where the results obtained using a BPDL and a traditional method are compared. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.