Oracle today announced it is proposing to lead a tooling project for the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) standard within the Eclipse Foundation open-source community. The proposed project underscores Oracle's continued commitment to making tools support for key standards-based technologies, such as BPEL, freely available to all developers.

A cornerstone for simplifying the development of service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications, BPEL is widely recognized as a critical technology for reducing the cost, complexity and inflexibility of integration projects and enabling developers to more easily orchestrate Web services into business processes. By bringing BPEL support and expertise to the Eclipse developer community, Oracle is helping drive further adoption of SOAs. As the proposed project lead, Oracle will help build an open source BPEL tool under the Eclipse Public License. The new tool will be based on technology that is currently included in Oracle(r) BPEL Process Manager and the corresponding BPEL Designer, Oracle's industry-proven BPEL tool. Oracle's BPEL Process Designer is currently integrated in the Oracle JDeveloper 10g environment and is also available separately as a plug-in for the Eclipse integrated development environment.

"BPEL is one of the most important standards required for the development of enterprise SOA applications," said Edwin Khodabakchian, vice president, Software Development, Oracle. "This project combined with our EJB 3.0 and JSF tooling projects for Eclipse developers, positions Oracle as a leader in making key SOA-related technologies and standards available to all developers regardless of which development environment they choose."

"Throughout the years, Oracle has demonstrated a strong commitment to developers," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. "We are pleased to have Oracle propose and lead Eclipse tooling projects for critical technologies such as EJB 3.0, JSF and now, BPEL. Their leadership and dedication to the developer community will play a pivotal role in the future success of these technologies."