Great article. It was a surprise to see our CDL tools displayed.

Just to ground this in business terms it is useful to consider what one migth use WS-CDL for.

At the moment there are two distinct uses of WS-CDL that are activly being pursued based on the Pi4 Tech tools (www.pi4soa.org) by real projects. These are:

1) As a means of describing the overall architecture of a SOA that involves several services that need to collaborate. The description is created in the tools and then service generation to Java - which creates state machines for each service into which business logic can be placed. When this has been done monitoring is used to determine what the services are actually doing based on the WS-CDL description. It makes life much better for developers and architects because it enforces behavior across the services and guarantees interoperability. This translates into much faster design, build, test, deploy lifecyles and is proving a bit of winner.

2) As a means of describing and then monitoring existing services (so no generation). It turns out the monitoring becomes even more important. The architect/developer creates teh WS-CDL of what they expect should happen and then monitors what actually happens against the WS-CDL description using our monitor tool. This gets even more important and the boundaries between enterprises as it provides behavioral goverance that can be imposed from the inside out.

Just wanted to ground it in some real world uses.

Well done.

Cheers

Steve T

Choreography is the dark continent of Web services: few onlookers have traveled there, and many question whether there are any riches to be brought home from the trip. In the first place, choreographies bear such a striking resemblance to business processes that the novice might think that the two types of artifacts are indistinguishable.