RE: [soa-rm] RE: Service definition at nauseum

Frank,

Your right, however, the alternative would be to chunk up the formal definition into separate sentences, which I would ordinarily be OK with but clearly from our experience, the stakeholder community out there ends up adopting a one sentence definition. For example, if we simply defined a SOA service as a capability offered and stopped there, nobody would get the essence of what services means in the context of SOA.

There are some key elements to our service (in the context of SOA) definition that it has to embody. One, is to articulate that a SOA service IS a capability offered by a provider for a consumer. Second, that access is provided using a prescribed [service] interface that abstracts (or hides) the implementation details of the capability. And finally, that it (the service) is exercised consistent with contract and policy constraints as specified by its [service] description.

<SIDEBAR> The last sentence is a slight variation from my earlier proposed definition and could be worded using slightly better English. What I noticed missing from the original definition of service in the RM was the notion of contract and it originally stated “…constraints and policies…” and we know, of course, that contracts are key to ANY service paradigm, and that both contracts and policies are just specific types of constraints. If somebody could clean up the wording a bit, that would be great. Maybe it’s OK as written above.</SIDEBAR>

I’m OK if we chunk these key characteristics of the definition for SOA service into separate sentences but they MUST be articulated in such a way that the collective whole constitutes the formal definition of this very important core concept of the SOA paradigm.

Cheers!

- Jeff

soa-rm message