Choreography tools deliver on promise of SOA
By Nitin Bharti, News Editor
07 Jun 2005 | SearchWebServices.com
As organizations deploy their applications to interact with a range of trading partners and external organizations, standards and tools are emerging to help them better define the rules of engagement.
Pi4 Technologies Ltd. recently unveiled the first version of a new set of choreography tools for defining how multiple parties collaborate in peer-to-peer, service-oriented business transactions.
The Pi4soa tools suite, which includes a choreography description editor and a choreography simulator, is an open source implementation of the Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL) being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Pi4soa is based on the Apache 2.0 license agreement and is available as an Eclipse plug-in.
"One of the problems is that people build services from a service-centric perspective," said Steve Ross-Talbot, co-chair of the W3C's Web Services Choreography working group and CEO of U.K.-based Pi4. "They look at individual services and not the more holistic process view of all services."
Aligning service-oriented architectures (SOAs) with business processes has been the goal of orchestration and choreography standards such as the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) and WS-CDL.
The difficulty with SOA and Web services, Ross-Talbot said, is that "they don't always meet business requirements. WS-CDL would certainly improve this today."
While WS-BPEL allows existing Web services to be orchestrated into composite services, WS-CDL goes a step further and describes the relationships between these composite services in a peer-to-peer environment.
