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.
After all, isn't choreography just a way to describe what a business process does (i.e., it choreographs the actions of its participants)? And then there is the dearth of choreography tools; until recently choreography was a topic learned by reading, not by hands-on experimentation. This article takes the trip. It describes how, in the ideal set of design tools, not only are choreographies and processes treated as entirely different artifacts (with different development life cycles), but that special modeling techniques are available to fully accentuate the nuances of choreographies.
