IEEE just published an article introducing SSDL: Asynchronous Messaging between Web Services using SSDL written by Savas Parastatidas, Simon Woodman, Jim Webber, Dean Kuo, and Paul Greenfield. You can find it here. You can also find much of the content (and more, I think) at ssdl.org, though on Jim Webber’s blog, he says that the IEEE version is:

all in ruthlessly clear IEEE edited prose

while Savas points out that it is heavily cut — so, choose your poison ;).

They did a great job of describing their approach to a WSDL replacement. SSDL allows for complex contracts between services far beyond what WSDL can support and does it in a straightforward way.

They even created an SSDL parser and code generator for .NET on top of WSE2.

SSDL’s message orientation fits perfectly with the description of MEST — my guess is we’ll see lots of SSDL in the coming book.

It will be interesting to see how SSDL progresses. Can we suppose that this is one thing Savas is doing at Microsoft?