New W3C standard choreographs Web services dance

New W3C standard choreographs Web services dance
By Rich Seeley

Three or more e-business companies have Web services and they want to 
connect, so what do they do? Send each other their WSDLs and hope for 
the best?

That is probably not the best practice, according to Steve 
Ross-Talbot, co-chair of the W3C WS-Choreography Working Group, which 
has released the first draft of its Web Services Choreography 
Description Language (WS-CDL) 1.0.

Borrowing a term from the world of dance, WS-CDL is intended help 
choreograph the Web services ballet, Ross-Talbot explained to XDT in 
an e-mail from his base in the U.K. where he is chief scientist at 
Enigmatec Corp.

WS-CDL describes and sets rules for how different Web services 
components will interact, according to the W3C. It provides for 
sequencing and also offers a "flexible systemic view of the process." 
The W3C positions WS-CDL "as a necessary complement to BPEL, Java, and 
other programming languages which describe one endpoint on a 
transaction, rather than the full system."

Asked what the choreography standard brings to the Web services dance, 
Ross-Talbot responded: "What has been missing has been the descriptions 
of how Web services work together in a peer-to-peer and a centralized 
fashion. WS-CDL is all about peer-to-peer."

He said the choreography standard makes it possible for three or more 
Web services to talk to each other without a broker to orchestrate the 
interaction.

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Received on Thursday, 6 May 2004 10:43:49 UTC