Reading through the BPML spec I find myself wondering if it could be used to wrap process flow around services that aren't "web services". Maybe they're stateless session beans or maybe they're just POJOs.

There is an activity type in BPML called Action. It takes portType and operation attrributes -- how about putting a fully qualified class name into portType and a method name into operation?

BPML also supports custom activity types...

What about properties? BPML treats them as fragments of XML. What if they too were POJOs? You would need some alternative to XPath for querying them -- beanshell comes to mind.

Why am I thinking about all of this?

I work with quite a large system that has a fairly well defined services layer. One service per legacy system -- about 12 in all. Most of these are just POJOs. We could easily make them web services (and in cases where we share the service, we have) but there is no need to incur that overhead or complexity.

I would love to be able to put BPML on top of the services to manage the process flow except it seems to require that my services be webservices.