BPEL4WS, web services choreography, web services orchestration, web services composition, ws-transaction, ws-coordination, ws-CAF... Have you heard enough about all the dazzling buzz words in recent press releases? As developers are just getting used to WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI, the web services technology pilots are now entering the web services choreography domain - composite web servies to form new, aggregate services. As competing specifications are published or brought to standards bodies to address various challenges in the choreography space, new buzz words are flying around again. Even as a insider in the standards initiatives, I sometimes found the terms are confusing and are used very differently in different context. I am thinking it may be a good idea to write something to explain what they are about, and how they are related. If you are also interested, please let me know what you care about in this space as a SAP developer or user.
It will take me some time to put something down, but if you are suffering from the buzzs now, I find the WWW2003 paper(pdf 53k) by a group of IBM reseachers, "Service-Oriented Composition in BPEL4WS", a good point to start.
