Service-orientation

Service-orientation is a design paradigm for computer software in the form of services. The principles of service-oriented design stress the separation of concerns in the software. Applying service-orientation results in units of software partitioned into discrete, autonomous, and network-accessible units, each designed to solve an individual concern. These units qualify as services.

History of service-orientation principles and tenets

Service-orientation has received a lot of attention since 2003 due to the benefits it promises. These include increased return on investment, organisational agility and interoperability as well as a better alignment between business and IT. It builds heavily on earlier design paradigms and enhances them with standardisation, loose coupling and business involvement. The paradigm lost momentum in 2009; since 2014, renewed interest can be observed under the Microservices moniker. In technology, different vendor SOA platforms have used different definitions of service-orientation. Some vendors promote different principles and tenets over others, but a fair amount of commonality exists.

Service-orientation inherits a small number of principles from earlier paradigms including object-oriented programming, component-based software engineering and open distributed processing. It is commonly acknowledged that several service-orientation principles have their roots in the object-oriented design paradigm: the two are complementary paradigms and there will always be a need for both. Services also inherit a number of features of software components, including
* Multiple-use
* Non-context-specific
* Composable
* Encapsulated i.e., non-investigable through its interfaces
* A unit of independent deployment and versioning
Open Distributed Processing (ODP) combines the concepts of open systems and distributed computing, which are essential characteristics of service-orientation. The key features of ODP are all inherited by service-orientation, including federation, interoperability, heterogeneity, transparency and trading/broking.

Essential characteristics

Don Box was one of the first to provide a set of design guidelines referred to as his "four tenets of service-orientation", which he described primarily in relation to the Microsoft Indigo (subsequently Windows Communication Foundation) platform that was emerging at the time:
# Boundaries are explicit
# Services are autonomous
# Services share schema and contract, not class
# Service compatibility is based on policy
Other vendors and independent consultants have published their definitions of service-orientation and SOA, for instance, N. Josuttis in "SOA in Practice" and D: Krafzig et al. in "Enterprise SOA". An article in the December 2005 edition of the IBM System Journal entitled "Impact of service orientation at the business level" provided a study of how the service-orientation paradigm relates to fundamental componentization and the IBM Component Business Model (CBM).

Paul Allen defines service orientation as a (business) paradigm, with three main components: business architecture, Service-oriented architecture and software oriented management. Allen's book defines seven Service-Oriented Viewpoints (labelled SOV7):

#Transparence
#*Smoothness of customer's experience in using the service.
#Customer fit
#*Ability to tailor offerings to variations in customer needs.
#Partner connectivity
#*Ability to use 3rd parties for performing commodity services
#*Ability to offer a service to different partners
#Adaptation
#*Adapting to the changes in the marketplace.
#Multi-channel capability
#*Support the customer end-to-end through process, using different channels to achieve continuity.
#*Offering same service through different channels.
#Optimization
#*Offering services in real time at high performance levels.
#One-stop experience
#*Catering to different needs of the customers through one set of services.
Allen uses the viewpoints as starting point for stating questions during the design process.

Service-orientation has continued to receive increased recognition as an important part of the service-oriented computing landscape and a valid design approach to achieving service-oriented architecture.

See also

* Loose coupling
* Service-oriented architecture (SOA)
* Service granularity principle
* Service-oriented modeling
* Software architecture
* Service-oriented communications (SOC)

References

Further reading

*
* Luba Cherbakov et al. (2005).
Impact of service orientation at the business level
. IBM Systems Journal Oct 2005
*
*
* Jenny Ang, Luba Cherbakov, Mamdouh Ibrahim (2005).
SOA antipatterns
. IBM Online article, Nov 2005.
* Ali Arsanjani (2004).
Service-Oriented Modeling & Architecture
. IBM Online article, 09 Nov 2004.

External links

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Business computing