When utilized within a Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services are part of a business process determining the logical order of service activities – logical units of work performed by one or more services. Today, the most popular tool for organizing service activities into business processes is Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL), a language defining an execution format for business processes operating on Web Services. While it is not a trivial task to define a business process definition with WS-BPEL from scratch, using a graphical WS-BPEL tool can significantly simplify this process.

With the help of many examples, the book explains how to build Web Services with PHP, combine them into SOAs with WS-BPEL, and then deploy composite WS-BPEL-based solutions to the ActiveBPEL engine. The examples in this book are presented in a way that anyone can understand and apply.