As the software market and practical considerations show during the last years new types of software architectures are necessary. Service oriented architectures (SOA) promise a better way to decouple software functionality from physical implementations and platforms. Practically today existing IT software infrastructure is oftentimes heterogenous and proprietary. In order to extend this given legacy systems with new functionality or migrate them softly and evolutionary towards a new architecture, (web) services based software systems can be introduced.

One of the techniques to implement these Service Oriented Archtitectures (SOA) is the open, XML based language BPEL. Some major software companies offer tools for development and running such BPEL based SOA systems on application servers. The most important one is Oracle with its Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle database and JDeveloper as development IDE. Visually designed workflows are compiled and deployed to a target application server.

Have a look at the following snapshots to get an impression of the development process, the administration and configuration of Oracle application server as well as the BPEL process manager.