Scheme Programming Language :: Scheme-based language and tools for BPEL programming


	Scheme-based language and tools for BPEL programming "Business Process Execution Language" (BPEL) is a very young programming language with very big ambitions. A BPEL program can define a long-running process, that can invoke many web services, where the services may be provided by many different organizations, running on different technology stacks, etc. The process may include asynchronous and parallel steps. To help it achieve independence from particular vendors or platforms, BPEL's syntax is XML. BPEL is cool, but what tool can be used to edit it? Let's consider a few alternatives. (1) Editing XML with a text editor is kind of painful. (2) We dream of being able to diagram a business process with a free and friendly diagramming tool, and being able to roundtrip between the diagrammatic view and the BPEL format. That dream is a long way from becoming real. (3) S-expressions (to the surprise of inventor McCarthy) have proven quite comfortable for many people to write, especially if they equip themselves with language-aware text editors. SXML and SSAX have shown that it is a short hop from XML syntax to S-expressions, and that Scheme's power can then be elegantly applied. Why not use Scheme to develop a language that uses S-expression syntax, and that can be roundtripped with BPEL? What do you think? Sounds interesting, although most folks that adopt BPEL will probably end up using the vendors tooling.