It's always good to get an idea of the big picture before diving into the
details of any technology-centric topic. For this reason, we'll take the time
to briefly mention the overarching goals and benefits associated with
service-oriented computing as they relate to Web Service contract design.
Because these goals are strategic in nature, they are focused on long-term
benefit - a consideration that ties into both the design and governance of
services and their contracts. An understanding of these long-term benefits
helps provide a strategic context for many of the suggested techniques and
practices in this guide.
Here's the basic list of the goals and benefits of service-oriented
computing:
Increased Intrinsic Interoperability Increased Federation Increased Vendor
Dive... (more)
One of the fundamental goals when designing service-oriented solutions is to
attain a reduced degree of coupling between services, thereby increasing the
freedom and flexibility with which services can be individually evolved.
Achieving the right level of coupling "looseness" is most often considered a
design issue that revolves around the service contract and the consumer
programs that ... (more)
Like data normalization, the Service Normalization pattern is intent on
reducing redundancy and waste in order to avoid the governance burden
associated with having to maintain and synchronize similar or duplicate
bodies of service logic."
You can see it introduces the Pattern on our publisher page.
When designing data architectures, you can easily end up with different
databases or even... (more)
Should a service only be considered a service if it's reusable? The answer to
this question, as asserted by this pattern, is a firm "no." While agnostic
services (services providing multi-purpose logic with reuse potential, as per
the Agnostic Context pattern), receive the most attention during service
modeling and design phases, it can often be short-sighted to focus only on
agnostic se... (more)
With the unwavering prominence of service-oriented architecture (SOA) there
is an increasing interest in understanding what exactly it means for
something to be considered "service-oriented." Thomas Erl recently completed
a lengthy research project for SOA Systems Inc. into the origins of SOA and
the current state of service-orientation among all primary SOA technology
platforms. This bo... (more)