According to Paul Brown, Matthieu Riou, Tammo van Lessen and others are working on a sort of compact syntax for BPEL (check out an example usage here).
Two things I’m wondering: (1) Can Ode orchestrate plain RESTful HTTP interactions? (2) How about using a language that supports internal DSLs and allows for easy access of Java libraries?
It seems to get around ;) Hopefully the WSDL crowd is coming up with something similar.
There is also a work-in-progress wiki page (it is currently a bit out-dated but contains some additional information). The major goal of SimPEL is to provide a more readable syntax for BPEL, without angle brackets and with way more convenient variable assignment mechanisms (E4X-like). However, at least for this first basic SimPEL version, we try to stick on BPEL concepts so that a (more or less straightforward) translation between SimPEL and BPEL is still possible.
Regarding (1): Not yet. Assaf has written a proposal for a RESTful BPEL variant (1, 2) but it’s not been implemented yet. Regarding (2): BPEL is mainly used to define long-running processes, whose instances may be hibernated until some events or messages arrive. It is also very likely that a huge number of process instances are running in parallel. I don’t think a common scripting language interpreter can handle such a scenario. But ODE’s pi-calculus engine can ;)