Home Stretch for BPEL 2.0

BPEL 2.0, the long-awaited love-child of the OASIS WS-BPEL TC, is at last in its final public comment phase. See John Evdemon's blog for all the links. Sure, conventional wisdom says two years is a long time to change Switch to If-then, but if Assaf's comments are correct, fixing BPEL 1.1's primitive data manipulation syntax may prove to be a far more significant change. Once the thing is finally approved we can anticipate a ripple effect on BPMSes, and a round of new questions. Will Microsoft actually support it? (Unlikely.) Will there be an actual spec submitted for BPEL4People and BPEL-Subprocess? (Probably, but will anyone but IBM and SAP care?) Will BPMN have to change to support the new BPEL? (Bigger problems than that confront BPMN.) Once BPEL 2.0 is approved by a vote in OASIS, I think it has 6 months to prove it was worth waiting for. If it can't do it, I think the energy on standardization moves to the modeling language (BPMN?) and the execution language becomes an implementation detail.