The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) claimed that fellow standards body BPMI.org’s plan to develop BPXL should be seen as complementary to BPEL rather than a rival.

Last week ComputerWire broke the news that BPMI.org is planning a new raft of capabilities to extend the power of business process execution language (BPEL), a standard from the OASIS standards group. BPMI.org board member Derek Miers confirmed in an interview with ComputerWire that the standards body is working on what it is calling Business Process eXtension Layers (BPXL), described as a standard that would help to enable interoperability between process modeling tools and process management engines.

But in an interview with ComputerWire late last week, OASIS president and CEO Patrick Gannon said that BPXL would complement BPEL, and in no way conflict with it. He said BPEL was never intended to solve every issue in process management: The charter for the [BPEL] work was laid out very explicitly; it was very clear what the work would be, said Gannon.

It was not designed to solve all of the problems in the process management space. We are focusing on the core specification first, then we will later produce extensions or profiles, which will be voted on, he said. We will take input from a variety of areas.

Gannon said that work on BPEL had been progressing as planned since it was handed to the group by Microsoft and IBM for ratification. BPEL is on track, he said. We have made steady progress since the beginning, and have the support of over 150 participants. It’s an 18-24 month process. We started with the initial spec BPEL4WS and we need to make that into an OASIS standard.

It is thought that BPEL will be approved as an OASIS standard around the middle of 2005.

Meanwhile Jeanne Baker, chair of BPMI.org, also insisted that the BPXL work is in no way intended to derail or rival BPEL: We endorse BPEL and we endorse OASIS, said Baker. The industry needs a single standard, not a confusion of standards. But she added that BPMI.org’s planned Business Process eXtension Layers (BPXL) standard will add capabilities not inherent in BPEL.

Even if a standard does what it is designed to do, there will always be gaps, said Baker. Organizations like BPMI.org are well suited to look at something like BPEL and do a gap analysis. Our qualified technologists can take a look at BPEL, identify gaps, propose a layer to lay on top [of BPEL], and submit that back to OASIS and say ‘what do you think of this?’

It would be irrational to try and compete [with OASIS], Baker continued. Standards are only good standards if they get adoption. We already participate in the BPEL TC [technical committee at OASIS].

So if BPMI.org is already participating in the direction of BPEL, why work on its own set of eXtension Layers? Different organizations can look at things from different perspectives, Baker said. OASIS has the burden of getting the buy-in of a large technical committee and the limitations of its charter. We can free-think, look around corners, respond to market dynamics.

BPXL is really short-hand for work to understand BPEL, identify gaps, and suggest extensions. It is not a language in itself, Baker added.