The IDE's BPEL Designer provides a highly graphical environment for authoring, deploying and testing web-service centric business processes. This is often called web service orchestration and is one of the keystones of service-oriented architecture (SOA). A BPEL process can be thought of as a logical aggregator and coordinator of web services. In such a process, a collection of partner web-service components can collaborate synchronously or asynchronously, participate in long-lived conversations, and support fault handling. Thus, the IDE's BPEL Designer feature extends the power of service-oriented architecture.
The BPEL modeling environment includes deployment runtime, and the ability to author, edit, test-run, and debug BPEL processes. The BPEL Designer feature lets you use drag-and-drop functionality to create visual diagrams of business processes to orchestrate web services. The BPEL Designer feature supports two-way round-trip engineering of processes that are expressed in the Web Services Business Process Execution Language Version 2.0 (WS-BPEL 2.0, or generically, BPEL).
In the BPEL Designer, you can create a business diagram in the visual Design view or manipulate source code in the Source view. The BPEL source code and its visual diagram are always kept in sync.
In the BPEL Designer, you can perform the following tasks to develop a business process. These tasks might iterate, and sometimes the order of tasks changes.