Web Services Forum

Many software developers treat the development of services and service-based application I much the same way as traditional software. This, however, can lead to problems due to technological and philosophical differences between service-based and traditional software. The main philosophical difference between the two is that services are meant to encapsulate useful business process that can be combined with other services/business processes from unintroduced third parties to create novel functionality. On the other hand traditional applications are typically monolithic systems controlled by a single organisation and are not easily integrated with other applications. The problem with composing applications from third party services or even services provided through separate organisational departments is the lack of control involved. Services provided by another entity cannot easily be changed and its availability needs to be governed through service level agreements. This adds extra steps to the development process. The main technological difference between service-based and traditional software is that the services that make up service-based applications can be distributed any where on the internet and implemented in a multitude of languages and platforms. If a service-based application is primarily a service consumer rather than a provided the application must be able to effectively choreograph and orchestrate existing services rather then implementing new functionality. Conversely one is primarily a service provider the emphasis needs to be on identifying and implementing services which represent useful business processes. All of these factors indicate that existing development process models and life-cycles are insufficient for the development of service-based applications. The following link points to work from the S-Cube project who are developing service engineering processes, practices and methods:

http://www.s-cube-network.eu/results/deliverables/wp-jra-1.1