Statistics: (314 Views) (0 Comments) Posted by: Adrian Marchis on Sunday, June 01, 2008 Categories: Business Process Management (BPM), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

As part of the design of service-oriented solutions it is common to label individual services according to the roles they fulfill. There are different types of roles, depending on the nature of the functionality being encapsulated and the context within which the service is being utilized.

For example, during runtime processing, services can assume different roles as they transition through processing stages within the execution of a larger activity. A service that receives a request message acts as the provider of the service and can therefore be labeled as the service provider in that instant. However, within a composition of services, the same service may turn around and forward the request message to another service. This effectively changes its role to that of the service requestor. These roles represent temporary states services transition through regardless of the nature of the functionality they provide.

When modeling business services, we are very much interested in the type of logic encapsulated within each service. As a result, a series of permanent classifications have emerged providing us with a set of high-level, predefined contexts that help us determine what should and should not be captured within a service boundary. These classifications are known as service models.

Author: Thomas Erl