Monday, November 17, 2008 8:25 AM
Since the beginning of my foray into SOA I have heard about composing services to 'write' new services. I have never really understood how this was supposed to work. Although, vague thoughts of Windows Workflow style wizards do come to mind. One of the first books that I have read on the subject 'SOA in practice'(2) even laid out yet another layered architecture (3 layers to boot) these were called basic services, composed services, and process services. Basic services are the basic building blocks that composed services would use and the processes would orchestrate them over time, I believe. This fell very much in step with what a consultant was telling us at the time although he kept trying to talk to us about Data SOA(1) (Imagine my expression at the thought of directly exposing my database over a Web Service layer micro indeed).
I have over the last 9 months been thinking alot about this topic and been having many excellent conversations with many great minds about this same topic. And I am starting to find some very basic examples of services that I would want to reuse. Things like a time out services, a subscription service, a deferment service, an email service and a storage service. These are very prototypical in nature, but I am already enhancing business services with these external services, and I am beginning to see how this could expedite the development of robust and dependable services.
I am looking forward to future discussion with my friends and readers on this topic as well.
-d
1. http://www.rgoarchitects.com/nblog/2008/08/17/WhyTheDatabaseAsAServiceIsABadIdea.aspx
2.http://www.amazon.com/SOA-Practice-Distributed-System-Design/dp/0596529554
http://www.rgoarchitects.com/nblog/2008/02/05/TheLayeredArchitectureStyle.aspx