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 form dependencies upon it.
However, for the service architect there are opportunities to establish
intermediate layers of abstraction within the service implementation that
further foster reduced levels of coupling between its internal moving parts
so as to accommodate the evolution and governance of the service itself.
These intermediate abstraction layers are created by the application of
Service Façade, a design pattern focused on intra-service design.
When designing a service, th... (more)
Despite the magnitude of a migration to a service-oriented platform, the
continuing uncertainty of critical WS-* standards, and the often thundering
impact of large-scale SOA deployments, now is the time to start considering
the move. The key to a successful transition is to find a spot of calm amidst
the storm of activity surrounding SOA, and develop an intuitive plan that
will guide your organization through a path of technical obstacles,
organizational resistance, and ever-shifting industry trends.
Count yourself lucky if you've had the foresight to coordinate your migration
... (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 body of work contributed to the mainstream SOA methodology
developed by SOA Systems and was also documented in Thomas's new book,
Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design. We ... (more)
Enterprise-wide harmonization is a desirable and ideal target state that
fully supports pretty much everything SOA and service-orientation stand for.
For those that have achieved such a state, bless your standardized hearts.
You have accomplished something that has eluded many others. However, not
attaining this state does not mean you cannot successfully adopt SOA.
In some circles it has become common to view an SOA initiative as an
all-or-nothing proposition that demands an uncompromising commitment to an
enterprise-wide transformation effort. For those that subscribe to this vi... (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 different database tables containing the same or similar
data. This has been the root of many well documented data maintenance and
quality issues that helped establish data normalization as widel... (more)