Chapter 4. SOA: More Than Services

Any discussion of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) has to begin by discussing the notion of a service. But you need to go beyond the concept of services and the technologies employed. Services are important because they are a means of achieving specific business benefits. You need to be clear about what those benefits are and equally clear about the discipline you need to impose in order to realize those benefits.

What Is a Service?

A service is a unit of functionality packaged for convenient and consistent use. Typically, this functionality consists of a body of information and a set of operations for managing this information. For example, the sales order management service depicted in Figure 4-1 manages ...

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