The Industrialisation of IT?

Over the years we've seen a few discussions around WS-CDL. For instance Gregor Hohpe mentioned it in the context of coversations, and there are at least two implementations of it in the wild. But unlike it's distant cousin WS-BPEL, WS-CDL has not been able to catch the imagination (and hype curve). Which is a shame because as we commented earlier:

As Jeff Schneider said:

The original WS-CDL specification was less than impressive, however, the concepts were right on. I haven't gone back to revisit the specs but I will. It will take people some time to understand the fundamental 'centralization' problem associated with BPEL. Until then, alternatives will largely be ignored.

Or as Charlton Barretto commented:

CDL enables the business stake holder, the business analyst, the enterprise architect and the application engineer to share their views of the same system in a synchronised fashion, by providing the means for each level of detail for each stake holder to be captured without that detail being necessarily exposed to the others. Also CDL provides the necessary provenance to enforce requirements at each level. In this fashion, CDL also enables the A in SOA, since it provides the manner in which architecture can be modelled, described and implemented.

Well Steve Ross-Talbot has come up with an interesting analogy to try to help things. As he says:

Possible the most important invention that gave rise to the industrial revolution and which Stevenson failed to patent was the micrometer. Stevenson was notorious for inventing things and not patenting them. So the inventor of the micrometer was William Gascoigne in the 17th century. It was directly responsible for the engineering discipline in constructing the steam engine and in constructing the Enfield rifle that was used during the civil war in the United States.

As Steve points out, the micrometer removed ambiguity in the engineering process and hence enabled precise engineering techniques that ultimately lead to industrialisation and allowed components to be manufactured separately "... with bullets being made in one place and gun barrels in another." Steve goes on to suggest that WS-CDL is the IT equivalent of the micrometer for the same reasons, in that it defines a way of precisely talking and reasoning about services.

... before a line of code is cut the CDL description is shown to be valid against the requirements and to be correct in computational terms (i.e. free from live locks, dead locks and race conditions).

CDL removes the ambiguity between implementation and requirements, allowing services to be designed and developed separately with the assurance that they can work together "as designed". What Steve is saying is that CDL is a necessary condition for service re-use. But will this help to persuade the sceptics, or are we in for a few more years in the Dark Ages?