Service orientation is a design paradigm that became popular in the last decade and continues to be appreciated by different organizations worldwide. Its popularity resulted in numerous discussions, articles, and books. As an introduction to the topic, we would recommend books written by Thomas Erl, particularly SOA Design Patterns and SOA Principles of Service Design both by Prentice Hall.
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style based on the concept of a service. Since there is no industry-standard describing services, let's talk about features and principles that make service a service. The following describes the features and principles:
Service granularity refers to the size and scope of the functionality. Roughly, a service exposes functionality to cover one business unit of work. During every SOA design, building services of the right granularity is a challenge. If you think of balancing between science, art, and craft, achieving...