Essential Business Process Modeling

Chapter Eight. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): Choreography

THE TOPIC OF CHOREOGRAPHY, THE CURRENT FLAVOR OF THE MONTH IN THE WORLD OF WEB SERVICES, refers to the attempt to build stateful, conversational, long-running, multiparticipant processes out of basic, stateless, atomic web services operations. The flurry of effort in the past few years on choreography is driven by the desire to extend the web services stack. Though choreography is not essentially a BPM technology, one of its main applications is the building of process-oriented business conversations, and hence there is an obvious link connecting choreography to BPM. Conversely, contemporary BPM languages such as BPEL are so obsessed with web services integration that many of their processes look like choreographies. The lines are blurred. This chapter explores choreography’s main concepts, standard approaches, and connections to BPM.