Paul Fremantle posted a brief analogy between classic UNIX pipelines and scripting for web services, and I posted a comment about some work going on with Ode that deserves a bit broader audience. Matthieu, Tammo, et al are working on a Javascripty language called SimPEL that maps to BPEL. They're making good progress, and the straw man examples are looking good, both for terseness and for legibility. It's still a way off, but it's on its way.
XML languages are known to be awful (hard on the hands, hard on the eyes, underspecified by document- or data-oriented schemata), and an orchestration DSL that maps onto BPEL has been on various wish lists for a while. (See, e.g., Brian's thought.) WSDL and XSLT should also be on the chopping block, and there are at least a few general approaches to abbreviating an XML syntax from which to draw inspiratiom. (See., e.g., RELAX NG compact syntax and Tom Moertel's PXSL.)
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