Re: [soa-rm] Re: Autonomous Services?

[Duane Nickull <dnickull@adobe.com>]

Smith, Martin wrote:

>I think we expect services in an SOA to be independent of the kind of
>shared contextual knowledge we usually presume within a local computing
>environment. We expect that the requesting service will be able to
>obtain all the info it needs to use the responding service successfully
>by processing the responding service's description metadata.  I do think
>this is a core characteristic of SOA services.
>  
>
Martin:

This is well written.  It may be an interesting way that one may 
distinguish SOA from other technologies that use similar patterns (OO, 
client server etc.).  The context of usage (if I may try to paraphrase 
your paragraph) is a service that may reside in a foreign environment 
from the service consumer.  Java RMI and the Java RMI registry use the 
same basic patterns as web services, however the context of deployment 
is always within a J2EE app server.  SOA may be deployed across 1-* 
environments, therefore additional elements have to be present alongside 
the services.

"Introspective" services sounds funny (like a service that regularly 
visits a therapist).  Since services are available in many types of 
environments, the concept that services are autonomous WRT they control 
the level of opaqueness is an interesting aspect. 

Duane

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