Sunday, January 08, 2006

The Social Side of Services 

The Social Side of Services: "Another way of stating this is that SOA success is based, in part, on achieving a critical mass of useful services. The technical line of reasoning for reaching and managing this critical mass typically goes like this:

1. For services to operate as a collective, they have to know about each other.
2. For services to know about each other, they must either be hardwired together or be able to dynamically find one another.
3. Hardwiring would be bad, as it implies high coupling and potential difficulties in replacing one service implementation with another somewhere down the line.
4. To facilitate dynamic discovery, then, services need a place that they can advertise themselves and meet other services.
5. Of course—a registry!

This line of reasoning usually fails because it ignores the hard problem of how services are created. It assumes that development teams will bring new services into being and that, because those services will want to interact with each other, the real problem is just providing a state-of-the-art registry to support those interactions. Over the years, I’ve seen plans and proposals for some pretty sophisticated registries, usually involving registration and query capabilities for all kinds of extensible service properties."

"For services to operate as a collective, they have to know about each other." - Is SOA in the same boat as the Semantic Web?

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