All you wanted to know about BPMN, BPEL & XPDL and did not know whom to ask...

Last week, my friend gave me a good perspective on BPMN, BPEL & XPDL which I am sharing here for benefit of you-all:

BPMN is the business process modeling standard and is the only standard which supports all kinds of Business Process Modeling products. It is a graphical representation of a process model and does not contain any execution details.

While, XPDL Standard is an extremely strong interchange format which not only supports graphical process but also persists all the activities, rules details associated with it. So you can take the process from system to system with same kind of visual representation. In XPDL 2.0 all of the nodes of a BPMN diagram and positions are reliably transferred from one product to another. Depending upon the target systems graphical layout it may look somewhat different.

BPEL Standard defines business processes using an XML-based language. It does not define a graphical representation of processes or provide any particular design methodology for processes. Not all BPMN notation are supported by it but XPDL probably does that rather nicely.