Chapter 18. Services

Services and service-oriented architectures are broad and much-discussed topics. This chapter touches on some of the highlights, looking at the concept of a service and why services cost more than traditional implementations. Given that an investment is required to create services, it explores the conditions under which services make sense and provide a return on that investment.

Traditional Approach

A service is a reusable unit of functionality with a standardized (abstracted) interface. Without services, as seen in Figure 18-1(a), a component wishing to use some functionality is tied to the provider of that functionality in a variety of ways. It is tied to the technology of the provider. If the function is a COBOL mainframe ...

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