BPEL

(pronounced as separate letters) Short for Business Process Execution Language for Web Services, an XML-based language for standardizing business processes in a distributed or grid computing environment that enables separate businesses to interconnect their applications and share data. Designed as a combination of IBM’s WebServices Flow Language and Microsoft’s XLANG spec, platform-independent BPEL allows enterprises to keep internal business protocols separate from cross-enterprise protocols so that internal processes can be changed without affecting the exchange of data from enterprise to enterprise. A BPEL document, for example, keeps track of all the business processes that are connected to a transaction and ensures that the processes are executed in the correct order through the automation of messages.

BPEL also is known as BPEL4WS.