Tuesday, August 05, 2003

Service Oriented versus Service Based

I found myself in a debate with some people around the term 'service oriented'. I fought that the term referred to the architectural pattern - that is, the triangle - producer, consumer, directory. My worthy opponent fought that most people that are building service based architectures are leaving out the directory. He went on to argue that if in the majority of the cases people were only using 2 of the 3 legs of the triangle, that we shouldn't refer to it as a 'service oriented' architecture. I agreed. We actually threw out the term Service Based to refer to a set of architectural patterns that revolve around services.

Thus:
'Service Oriented' refers to the triangle pattern.
'Service Based' refers to the set of patterns that leverage services (service oriented, pipe & filter, pipe-to-pipe, etc.)

It is clear that confusion still exists in this area... more work neeeded.

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