“We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.”
― Robert Wilensky

The vision of BPEL !

Comon now, BPEL isn't that bad. Check out another Oracle Policy Automation product (an Aus company bought out by the big red). Supposedly you can just copy and paste a word document and render those into policies/rules. Pretty nifty, even a BA can do it!

Might be usable in a few years once Oracle's customers (aka beta testers) have shaken the bugs out of it.  And yes BPEL is that bad (please don't get me started - I have been doing very well to forget how bad it is)

I still happen to think that BPEL is best used for the job for which it was intended - service composition and orchestration. Abusing BPEL outside this paradigm for building systems better suited to complex event processing and ESBs can only be a long and painful journey. When all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail - but it doesn't mean that the hammer is useless to start with.