WS-BPEL 2.0 Beginner's Guide Book Review

I had the opportunity to read the WS-BPEL 2.0 Beginners Guide Book from PACKT publishing. The authors of this book has done a very good job in explaining the concepts in a simple and concise manner.

It is a very descriptive and practical guide to a beginners in BPEL. Writing an executable BPEL process is a very different task compared to write code in a general purpose programming language. The reason for that is, you need to have background knowledge on a lot of technologies in order to properly understand and implement a BPEL process. Minimum set of those technologies include SOAP / HTTP web services, WSDL, XML ,  Xml schema and XPath.

Hence , WS-BPEL 2.0 beginners guide takes an ideal approach for a beginner. It starts by introducing the basic concepts and straightaway goes into a practical example. It chooses oracle SOA Suite as the target technology stack and  JDeveloper  as its development environment for BPEL and provides step by step screen shots on how to implement a process.  Next it explains each and every step taken in implementing the sample process and how to deploy and test the process. I find this approach very useful, simply because, when learning a complex technology like BPEL, the best approach is to start with simple exercises to get the feel for the technology and then dive into the more complex topics step by step.

This pattern is followed for all the chapters as well. Each new chapter introduces a concept from BPEL, and goes onto a practical example explaining the details and finally testing the process. Hence, when you finish reading the book, not only you will understand the concepts in BPEL, but also, you would have mastered to BPEL development tool. As BPEL is developed mostly by using graphical tools, mastering the development environment is an essential skill for becoming a skilled BPEL developer.

The book explains the concepts in words as well as using diagrams. Book covers all the concepts from BPEL specification including topics such as synchronous processes, asynchronous processes, message correlation, fault handing , compensation handling ect.

In addition to BPEL concepts, book also covers the WS-Human Tasks space as well. The human tasks tooling capabilities of JDeveloper as well as the concepts are explained in a concise manner. In many practical process implementations in the industry there will be BPEL as well as human tasks. Hence for a beginner, this book is an ideal guide to master the BPEL based workflow technologies. Also, This book can be useful for an experienced BPEL developer migrating from another tool to JDeveloper.

Finally , I would recommend this book to anyone who is new to BPEL and is looking for a practical guide to learning BPEL related workflow technologies.