Rich Services: The Integration Piece of the SOA Puzzle

One of the key challenges to successful systems-of- systems integration using Web services technologies is how to address crosscutting architectural concerns such as policy management, governance, and authentication, while still maintaining the lightweight implementation and deployment flavor that distinguishes Web services from earlier attempts at providing interoperable enterprise systems. To address this challenge, this article introduces the notion of a Rich Service, an extension of the standard service notion, based on an architectural pattern that allows hierarchical decomposition of system architecture according to separate concerns. Rich Services enable the capture of different system aspects and their interactions. By leveraging emerging Enterprise Service Bus technologies, Rich Services also enable a direct transition from a logical to a deployed service-oriented architecture (SOA). This results in immediate benefits not only in SOA design, implementation, deployment, and quality assurance, but also in the traceability of architectural requirements to an SOA implementation.