As companies embrace service-oriented architecture, the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) continues to gain traction as a means to weave Web services into meaningful business processes. While BPEL allows existing services to be orchestrated into composite services, the Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL) goes a step further and describes the relationships between services in a peer-to-peer scenario. In this interview, Steve Ross-Talbot, co-chair of the W3C Web Services Choreography Working Group, describes choreography and how it differs from orchestration in the context of Web services. He compares the WS-CDL and BPEL specifications, looks at how the two can work together and describes four tools that will be needed to work with WS-CDL.
