Next Generation Application Integration: From Simple Information to Web Services

Understanding Service Frameworks

When dealing with Web services, or any service-level integration technology, you must understand the notion of service frameworks and how they differ from more traditional frameworks. This is the idea behind composite applications, which are applications made up mostly of back-end application services.

Service frameworks, in contrast to object frameworks, lack inheritance. Although they provide services, they generally don't provide access to the source code for the distributed objects, making it difficult—though not impossible (depending on the tool or language)—to modify or extend the behavior of distributed objects (e.g., Web services) and service frameworks for an application. As such, service frameworks are ...