In the first half of this chapter, we explained how to invoke an asynchronous web service from a BPEL process instance. Hence, the BPEL process instance may remain active for a very long time. For example, a loan approval process may take weeks to be completed. If a BPEL process instance is expected to remain active for an undetermined period of time, the BPEL process itself should be deployed as an asynchronous process because the BPEL process also cannot reply back to its caller within a definite time period due to external asynchronous web service invocations, which happen within the BPEL process. In this section, we will model an asynchronous BPEL process and compare it with a synchronous BPEL process.

Oracle JDeveloper editor supports the creation of an asynchronous BPEL process via a predefined process definition template. You can create an asynchronous BPEL process with following steps: