The BPEL backlash has begun in earnest. I alluded to the problems of applying BPEL as the solution to all routing & rule definition problems in yesterday's blog entry. Now David Linthicum opines that BPEL ain't there yet.
I quite liked David Chappell's take. BPEL is important as a business protocol specification language. It can be an effective way to model distributed interactions, though it is an "orchestrated" approach vs. a "choreographed" one. But BPEL is not "really" going to be a portable execution language, except perhaps within some communities (i.e. Java), and even then there are missing extensions that are just now being considered (i.e. BPEL4People).
Though you'll notice the omnipresent VP of Oracle's BPEL PM, Edwin Khodabakchian, posting comments defending his solution. I like Oracle's BPEL PM, I think it's comparable to MS Biztalk or BEA WLI (which is saying a lot), but it's just as "locked in" as those solutions are. Perhaps porting between IBM WBI and Oracle BPEL is a bit easier than the others, because they both use WSIF. But JBI is going to replace WSIF some day, arguably. And WSIF/JBI don't work with .NET or other environments. There are big problems lurking here.
