Product Description
Excellent introduction to BPEL – the business process execution language. A number of Web services orchestration / process tools are based on BPEL but hide the language behind a drag-and-drop GUI. To effectively use these tools, though, you have to understand the concepts that make up BPEL – scopes, partner links, correlation sets etc. This book likely provides the best introduction to these concepts. Examples are given in raw BPEL as well as using Oracle BPEL Manager and Microsoft BizTalk. There is coverage of advanced topics, such as correlation and convoys, a great introduction to BPEL best practices. In summary, if you are interested specifically in BPEL, this is likely the book you want to get.
BPEL 100 Success Secrets – Business Process Execution Language for Web Services- THE XML-based language for the formal specification of business processes, … protocols and SOA based integration
Since the topic of this book is BPEL you might be surprised to find the question “Have you heard of business process execution language, or BPEL?” more than a third of the way through it, on page 68. But there’s an explanation: the book consists of one hundred short (usually one page) essays. Each essay is self-contained; they don’t build on each other. Page 68 is just the beginning of one of these one hundred essays. Reading this book is like reading the first page of one hundred different BPEL books.
To be fair, the book isn’t totally repetitive. One of the essays (page 73) is about “broadband over power lines”, or BPL. This essay was apparently included because the letters in “BPL” are almost the same as the letters in “BPEL”. No connection was made between BPL and BPEL in the essay.
Other surprises: (a) according to page 32 WSDL is a scripting language and (b) according to page 40 the application you need to read a PDF file is Adobe Photoshop. The book’s 42 nearly blank pages (out of 152 total) contain fewer inaccuracies.
There isn’t much to learn about BPEL in this book. The only benefit I could imagine anyone gaining from it is the enjoyment of its frequent whimsical–almost poetic–misuses of the English language. (Example from page 111: “both presents one problem to developers” ["present" intended]. From page 149: “BPEL can be compared to a child who comes from a mix race” ["mixed" intended].) I read it to the end for that very reason.
I was originally going to throw the book away but I’ve decided to keep it so I can share its profound insights with my friends. Example from page 101: “To clean out the toxins that are stored in the body system, proper waste management should also be taken into consideration.” From page 104: “When history is being talked about, it always connotes a significant event that happened in the past.” Page 148: “Since spending of hard-earned money is concerned, it is really very important to weigh things out first and be intuitive as to what the end results will be.” I’m shelving it with my humor books.
I was left with a grudging admiration for the author who came up with the idea of selling this book. (The book itself does not indicate a publisher.) He was smart enough to get $20 of my money for nothing.
Rating: 1 / 5