BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) is a language based on XML
built to formally describe business and industrial processes in a way that allows tasks to be divided between different actors, in practice it allows workflow processes to be defined using XML
.
Normally a BPEL
application is invoked as a web service, and interacts with the outside world only by invoking other web services.
It represents a form of coordination of web services, allowing them to be composed recursively.
The runtime environment within which the process runs is called the BPEL
engine.