jPDL vs. BPEL - I am a bit confused

[rainstar79]

Hi jBPM Gurus,
I am a bit confused in one thing. Maybe you can help me.
I am trying to introduce some students BPM and BPEL. It is just to give them a short overview about tools, methods, standards,...
Therefore I wanted to set up a jBPM environment to test some things for a presentation. I thought, when I install jBPM I can use the Eclipse Plugin to model a BPEL file graphically. But I guess that the output is something called jPDL. How could you compare this with BPEL? What is more powerfull - BPEL or jPDL? What are the restrictions of jPDL? Is there a way (or need) of mapping a jPDL after modeling with the graphical tool into BPEL for further processing? Can you recomend me a free modeling tool for generating BPEL which works well with jBPM?
Thanks for your help
Rainer

[developerdev]

BPEL and JPDL are used in differant context. JPDL is a grapgh oriented language developed by jboss. It runs on jbpm engine developed by jboss itself. But BPEL is industry standard. It's purpose is orchestration of webservices. So it is also called bpel-ws. So JPDL and BPEL are used in differant scenarios. JPDL is used to write business logic in graph oriented way. BPEL is used to write the rules for orchestration of many business funtioanalities exposed by partner systems(WEB services).

To run bpel on jboss you have to use jbpm-bpel extension (that is in beta phase)

Oracle provides free modeling tool for bpel. I am not sure wheter eclipse provides it or not.