In this chapter, we have learned how to communicate with external web services in an asynchronous manner and also learned how to invoke an asynchronous BPEL process. This chapter is important as the asynchronous communication is essential to be implemented in real-world long-running business processes where the request-response time is undetermined for a particular external web service invocation. Also, there are circumstances where the endpoints defined for the response and for the particular request are exposed by different web services. For an example, a business process can invoke its purchase service. But the confirmation response to that particular request actually comes from the shipping process. In such scenarios, asynchronous communication is inevitable. The concepts we learned in this chapter are useful in real-world business process developments.

In the next chapter, we will learn about fault handling and signaling, which is another interesting and important topic. Fault handling and signaling come into play when the business process needs to handle expected and unexpected behaviors during the business process execution time. Let's discuss this in more detail in the next chapter.