Concept of Sub Process and Starter Process in BPEL

Question

Hi Forum -
With my limited understanding of BPEL I have found that if a process has to interact with another process it has to be exposed as a service however that is not good in all cases.
Is there a way in BPEL where once can create a process and do not expose it as service and still be able to call it from another BPEL process.
For example there can be a process called sendNotification and all the other processes if they want to send a notification can call this process.
In TIBCO there is a concept of Starter Process and Sub Process. A Starter Process is a process which will wait for an event to take place, like a web service request or a JMS message or a database adapter event and then this main process can call a sub process, just like the main program calling a function. This sub process need not be defined as a service in TIBCO and it can still accept an xml schema type as input.
Is this possible in BPEL?
Thanks!

Answer 1

10g -> Every process is a service.
11g -> Create a Composite, You could wire multiple BPEL Components and expose only the desired ones as a service through a mediator or directly the bpel. Mediator provide one more layer of virtualization and hides even the first master bpel component.
But if the send notification have to be reused outside the composite, it has to be an exposed service. Although it is exposed as a web service, it uses only WSIF binding to interact between bpel processes and not a soap binding(unless specifically instructed).
If you are looking for function kind of construct, you could create custom xpath functions (like logging etc.)
-Sridhar