Understanding SOA, Web Services, BPM, BPEL, and More
Part One: SOA, Web Services, and BPM
by P.J. Jakovljevic
In the larger schema of things, SOA would espouse general, more abstract concepts of software reusability and encapsulation within certain boundaries (as to then provide access to that software via defined interfaces), Web services would then make these SOA concepts vendor-independent due to their use of generally accepted standards, while BPM and BPEL would be some of the engines making the whole system work.