Re: Proposed text for section 1.6.2 and 1.6.3

Mike,

Some people were not comfortable with equating services with
agents, including me.  Here's a proposed rewrite of the first half
of your paragraph with a fix for that [changed text in brackets]:

[A SOA characterizes a specific type of distributed system in which agents
provide "services".  For the purposes of this document, a "service" is an
abstract unit of work representing beneficial change or useful information
accessible to clients through a well defined interface.  Services are
discrete, even
though the agents that implement them may be part of a larger application,
including agents which implement more than one service.  In this sense,
"services" may represent a modular, networked view of an arbitrarily
complex [legacy?] application.]  For example, the purchase
order processing capability of an enterprise resource planning system might
be exposed as a discrete service, and only the interface description would
be needed to invoke it. Furthermore, most definitions of SOA stress that
"services" have a network-addressable interface and communicate via standard
protocols and data formats.

Original version below:

> A SOA is a specific type of distributed system in which the agents are
> "services" For the purposes of this document, a service is a software
agent
> that performs some well-defined operation (i.e., "provides a service") and
> can be invoked outside of the context of a larger application. That is,
> while a service might be implemented by exposing a feature of a larger
> application, nonetheless the users of that server need be concerned only
> with the interface description of the service. For example, the purchase
> order processing capability of an enterprise resource planning system
might
> be exposed as a discrete service, and only the interface description would
> be needed to invoke it. Furthermore, most definitions of SOA stress that
> "services" have a network-addressable interface and communicate via
standard
> protocols and data formats.

Comments?

--Walden

Received on Thursday, 8 May 2003 21:04:05 UTC