Building Composite Web Services Using BPEL

A web service is an interoperable unit of application logic that transcends programming languages, operating systems, network communication protocols, and data representation dependencies and issues. BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) is a programming abstraction that allows developers to compose multiple discrete Web Services into an end-to-end process flow. It has built-in support for asynchronous interactions, flow control and compensating business transactions and integrates with XPath, XSLT and XQuery for XML data manipulation. BPEL is an emerging standard for assembling a set of discrete web services into a composite web service. A geographic information system (GIS) is a system for management, analysis, and display of geographic knowledge. This knowledge is represented using a series of information sets such as maps and globes, geographic data sets, processing and work flow models, data models, and metadata. ESRI (http://www.esri.com) hosts a GIS server (ArcIMS) which is exposed as ArcWeb Services that provides diverse user community access to geospatial content. The objective of this project is to design and implement a GIS Web application that uses BPEL processes to provide functionality to its users. ArcWeb Services public services (a no-cost subset) hosted by ESRI are used to create one or more composite web services (or BPEL processes). Oracle BPEL Process Manager is used to design and deploy the BPEL processes created