Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

1.18. BUILD YOUR SERVICES THE "RIGHT" WAY (DESIGN-TIME GOVERNANCE)

Once you have identified the right services, whether they are existing services or candidate services mapped to your SOA strategy, you must still build them such that they enable the business value you desire. That means building your services right so they are reusable, composable, atomic, stateless, extensible, and agile. In other words, build them the right way. For example, there is a lot of debate about SOAP/WSDL Web services versus RESTful services in the industry today, which in our opinion is the wrong debate. The debate should not be about which technical services paradigm is better than the other, but about when and how to match the appropriate technical implementations of services to the needs and demands of your enterprise. This is why an SOA strategy is so important. Any services that do not support the SOA strategy must be postponed. Any technical service implementation approaches that do not support your SOA strategy or enable services interoperability and reuse must be avoided. There may well be a use for both SOAP/WSDL and RESTful services in your SOA, but you must understand the business and technology issues that support this decision and plan accordingly. This must be an explicit choice rather than one you discover after the fact. We suggest mapping your SOA services taxonomy to the various service technologies and implementation models available, and then making the right choices based on your ...