ECMAScript for XML

Abstract: The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) uses XML to specify the data used within a process and realizes data flow via (globally) shared variables. Additionally, assign activities can be used to copy (parts of) variables to other variables using techniques like XPath or XSLT. Although BPEL’s built-in functionality is sufficient for simple data manipulation tasks, it becomes very cumbersome when dealing with more sophisticated data models, such as arrays. ECMAScript for XML (E4X) extends JavaScript with support for XML-based data manipulation by introducing new XPath-like language features. In this paper we show how E4X can help to significantly ease data manipulation tasks and propose a BPEL extension that allows employing JavaScript/E4X for implementing them. As E4X allows defining custom functions in terms of scripts, reusability with respect to data manipulation is improved. To verify the conceptual framework we present a proof-of-concept implementation based on Apache ODE.