2006-10-05 Useful Addition to BPEL developers bookshelf

This book, a collection of real world BPEL patterns is a must for any budding or experienced BPEL developer. My company, are a UK based software development company specialising in SOA solutions. We have deployed a number for successful SOA projects with BPEL, running on the Oracle BPEL engine, being the cornerstone technology on these projects. This book, along with associated tutorials, has been a contributing factor in achieving this success - giving us a headstart for some of the key patterns you will need in any BPEL project. It has saved us many days in our R&D lab by pointing us to the code we require for standard tasks required in our BPEL process - these patterns have proved a good addition to our BPEL team's developer standards and guidelines. The book is intuitive to follow, leading the developer you through cases with workable examples that you can build and deploy in your own environment.

All of the patterns in the book form a useful library of common BPEL scenarios. The pattern related to Dynamic Partner Links gave our development team a great hand in designing BPEL projects for production - on certain projects we use this extensively to give deployment options that are not suited to a web service directory.

The chapter on maintenance and management was invaluable for our Application Administrators. It is always easy to get a Proof of Concept BPEL process working in a lab environment, it is the issues faced when rolling this out across an enterprise that cause often time consuming resolution. This chapter gives many tips and leads you to understand the dehydration store for BPEL instances - a very good start point to build up reference documentation for any Application Administrator who intends to manage BPEL in a live environment.

Chapters on Business Rules (a technology that I feel is essential within SOA and within any BPEL solution) and on Reliable Processing give an introduction to the topics a developer will need to understand to build production standard BPEL. The chapters on Rich Application UI and Building BPEL processes on the fly raised interesting ideas that have certainly triggered design innovations in our team. The WSIF chapter is very useful as a reference and includes many examples of techniques for what you will need within your toolkit.

Altogether an excellent addition to any developers bookshelf, but of particular necessity to anyone intending to use Oracle SOA tools to develop applications.