BPEL

Like a courting young man, I stumbled into the beauty of BPEL yesterday. The promise of a cost effective, standards based integration technology was too good to resist.

The adventure started through the installation wizard of IBM's WebSphere Integration Developer. Hard stop. WID cannot be installed on the same machine as Rational Application Developer, my primary development environment at TransAlta.

"BPEL is just a standard, the tooling shouldn't matter", was my next thought. Off to Oracle I went.

I read Oracle's 2 minute tutorial on their Eclipse based BPEL Designer.

So, 30 minutes and zero Oracle experience yielded the following:
A Hello World BPEL
A deployed BPEL that reads my existing SAP Integrated Web Services (big step).

Well done Oracle, I'm impressed. IBM could learn a thing or two from you about how to introduce a developer to their new technologies.