--- In [email protected], "Rob Eamon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/06/entity-services has a decent summary > of the viewpoints of entity services being an anti-pattern or not.
You're right, something for both sides in that article! I like Dubray's assessment: "If you ever hope to enforce this kind of business logic at the enterprise level and give your business analysts the freedom to design business processes, you have to enforce this logic behind the entity service interface not above ! So yes, Entity Services are, IMHO, the keystone of a successful enterprise wide SOA." Aside from my obvious agreement of the importance of entity services, what seems even more important is this hidden gem: "...give your business analysts the freedom to design business processes". The predominant goal of SOA is to achieve business agility, which is stated here as business analysts designing new processes out of existing services. Once achieved, the business avoids the 12, 18, or 24 month development cycle common today to implement a major new business initiative, because new processes are orchestrated out of existing services, not redeveloped. This is an oversimplification, and still a pipe dream, but this is the goal of SOA, is it not? Rob, if you agree that the goal of SOA is business agility, then this statement would seem to carry little weight relative to achieving that goal: > That would seem to me to be "data oriented architecture" instead of > service oriented. because it suggests a particular way to be "service oriented", rather than commenting on the effectiveness of achieving the goal of business agility. In other words, if it turns out that entity services improve business agility, that is still insufficient based on this comment, because they don't meet the criteria of having been designed from a service oriented viewpoint. But this argument is very abstract, when we have a good opportunity to get concrete. Rob, do you have any comments on the service partitioning that Colin K presented? I haven't yet heard an argument why the entity services in that example are a bad idea. (see http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-architecture/message/11506 for the example). -Kirstan
