SOA - Service Categories
Description
The service is a kind of operation which is well defined, self contained that performs a specific task.
The following figure shows SOA service categories:
The service can be categorized into following ways:
Entity Service
The entity services include entities of customer such as purchase order, insurance policy, invoice of order, ordered date etc in which you can perform CRUD operations such as Create, Read, Delete and Update on the entities. These services provide information of the business process stored in the databases and handle the business entities.
Task Service
The task service adds the business logic to other services and due to its focus on business entity, it contains low amount of reusability. Task services provide operations on more than one entity such as customer purchase order, creating purchase order number, validating customer details etc. A service is called as task service when it needs to access the multiple entities.
Utility Service
The utility services are technology oriented services which are used to build larger and higher level services and provides other capabilities which are unrelated to the message transfer. The utility services provide reusable functions such as event logging, creating unique number and notification etc to the other functional domains. These services contain small, closely packed services which are used as building blocks in service oriented system.
Proxy Service
The proxy services contain the services which act as connection between members of the service oriented system and conflict subsystem. The device and process services lie under this type of services. Sometimes services which are defined under proxy services are called as gateway services.
Device Service
The device service is a kind of proxy service which is referred as hardware device and used to communicate between other services. The device service does not include the API which is not well suited with the service oriented system.
Process Service
The device service is also a kind of proxy service which acts as interpreter between application and service oriented system members. This service creates and arranges the application services to implement the business processes.
Business Service
Business services are also known as controller service which provides business functions for the completion of the business process and are flexible services that changes the business needs. These services develop the business applications that automate the business process such as managing the customer service, shipping the customer product etc.
