BPEL and XPDL are entirely different yet complimentary standards.
BPEL is an "execution language" designed to provide a definition of web services orchestration, specifically the underlying sequence of interactions, the flow of data from point-to-point. For this reason, it is best suited for straight-through processing or data-flows vis-a-vis application integration.
The goal of XPDL is to store and exchange the process diagram, or specifically to allow one tool to model a process diagram, and another to read the diagram and edit, another to "run" the process model on an XPDL-compliant BPM engine, and so on.
For this reason, XPDL is described not an executable programming language like BPEL, but specifically a process design format that literally represents the "drawing" of the process definition. To wit, it has ?XY' or vector coordinates, including lines and points that define process flows. This allows an XPDL to store a one-to-one representation of a BPMN process diagram. For this reason, XPDL is effectively the file format or "serialization" of BPMN, as well as any non-BPMN design method or process model which use in their underlying definition the XPDL meta-model (there are presently about 50 tools which use XPDL for storing process models.)
Last edited by kswenson myopenid com 9/5/2008(Effective date 9/5/2008)
How does XPDL compare to BPEL?
BPEL and XPDL are entirely different yet complimentary standards.
For this reason, XPDL is described not an executable programming language like BPEL, but specifically a process design format that literally represents the "drawing" of the process definition. To wit, it has ?XY' or vector coordinates, including lines and points that define process flows. This allows an XPDL to store a one-to-one representation of a BPMN process diagram. For this reason, XPDL is effectively the file format or "serialization" of BPMN, as well as any non-BPMN design method or process model which use in their underlying definition the XPDL meta-model (there are presently about 50 tools which use XPDL for storing process models.)