Speaking in definitions, a Service is a Component that performs an action (as
opposed to represent a thing like EntityBeans).
Services would include your different J2EE containers, and the things that
they do.
Surely then it makes it desirable to have a 'Thing' and 'Service' supertypes to distinguish between them?
I'm not sure what you mean by 'Thing' here, but JSR77 makes a distinction between a resource and an instance of a resource (a service). So they have things like a JDBC Driver (a resource) and a JDBC connection pool (a service). Is that what you mean?
Yes, but I couldn't think up a good word for a non-service class; resource sounds like it fits the bill. But would then things like Servlets, EJBs etc be resources as well?
Alex.
