Apache ODE (Orchestration Director Engine) executes business processes written following the WS-BPEL standard. It talks to web services, sending and receiving messages, handling data manipulation and error recovery as described by your process definition. It supports both long and short living process executions to orchestrate all the services that are part of your application. WS-BPEL is an XML-based language defining several constructs to write business processes. It defines a set of basic control structures like conditions or loops as well as elements to invoke web services and receive messages from services. It relies on WSDL to express web services interfaces. Message structures can be manipulated, assigning parts or the whole of them to variables that can in turn be used to send other messages. Apache ODE is currently moving from the Apache Incubator up to Top Level (as Top Level Project). The new website will be found at http://ode.apache.org/

Well done on graduation and looking forward to seeing ODE succeed as a top level project. Good job!

I don't know if it supports the flexibility to change the Web Services Layer implementation. Precisely, if someone wants to use JAXWS instead of AXIS2.

Alim BPEL hides this from you as you don't code to any WS interface (JAXWS Axis2 or other) because the XML concept is built directly into BPEL. Axis2 has most JAXWS support and it will be complete soon.

How does it stand against Apache CXF + ServiceMix? Can anyone give a short comparison? To me, it seems much more flexible, at least theoretically. Also CXF is next incarnation of XFire (which I'm great fan of), being much more convenient and human-friendly than Axis2.

So ODE and CXF + ServiceMix would be two totally different beasts. Actually ODE also supports ServiceMix natively, for the JBI fans. ODE is an implementation of the WS-BPEL specification and as such allows sophisticated ways to orchestrate your web services communications. You code your processes using a specialized XML grammar (but there are designers out there, don't worry) and the engine calls your services and organizes the execution flow using your process. So you usually don't even see the communication layer (assuming you're in Web Service mode and not JBI) and could invoke ODE using CXF as a client for example. But we've had a pretty good experience with Axis2 as well so far. And thanks Paul for the congrats!

Congratulations to ODE team. Latest Lomboz supports BPEL deployment to ODE.

Wow that's great! I didn't even know! Feel free to pop up on ODE's mailing lists to let us know about your stuff!

ODE support will be available in Lomboz 3.3 in 2 weeks. Sorry for misinformation. :(