Pi4 Technologies announces open source WS-CDL tools suite

[Steve Ross-Talbot <steve@enigmatec.net>]

PRESS RELEASE

7th June 2005

Pi4 Technologies (www.pi4tech.com), a UK based open source company is 
pleased to announce the release of the first WS-CDL (Web Services 
Choreography Description Language) tools suite.

WS-CDL provides a standard interchange format for describing B2B Web 
Services and inter-enterprise SOA distributed systems. The tool suite 
conforms to the latest WS-CDL specification and is aimed at developers 
who wish to try out WS-CDL as a means of describing their distributed 
systems.

Until now, the semantics associated with a business protocol or an 
inter-enterprise distributed system could only be described with 
limited success using techniques such as UML sequence diagrams. This 
makes it difficult to understand the interrelationships between the 
divergent paths of the business protocol or services in an SOA. The 
global model approach taken by WS-CDL enables the complete business 
protocol semantics and the flow between services in an SOA to be 
clearly specified, and provides the means to project the expected 
behavior of each endpoint (service).  This approach ensures that the 
endpoints (services) conform to their role within the choreography and 
so guarantee interoperability, remove deadlocks, livelocks and race 
conditions from such systems.

The tool suite is provided as an open source (Apache 2.0) plug-in to 
Eclipse 3.X and is available through the open source Pi4SOA website at 
www.pi4soa.org and an examples repository is available from the Pi4 
Technologies web site at www.pi4tech.com.

The tool suite includes a validating editor for constructing valid 
WS-CDL along with an editor for creating test scenarios that can be 
used to test, simulate or even show conformance of a set of messages to 
a WS-CDL description. In the pipeline for the next release are further 
tools for endpoint (or service) generation to Java and to WS-BPEL (or 
BPEL4WS1.1), a graphical editor as well as advanced type checking that 
will include static checking for deadlocks, livelocks and race 
conditions.

Steve Ross-Talbot, CEO and co-founder of Pi4 Technologies, said "We are 
delighted to offer the first WS-CDL tools suite to the community at 
large. The tools have been provided under an open source license to 
ensure the maximum take up of the technology and adoption of the 
standard. The tools are complimentary to existing development methods 
and execution platforms such as J2EE and BPEL".

About Pi4 Technologies Ltd
Pi4 Technologies was established in May 2005 to leverage and deliver 
value from the pi-calculus in an open source business model. The first 
tools available are in the area of Web Services Choreography and are 
based on the Web Services Choreography Description Language. Pi4 
Technologies offers consulting services and professional open source 
support for the technologies that it delivers. For more information 
visit www.pi4tech.com.