Best practices 2 - Web Services

There are two best practices that make for excellent web services -Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Management (BPM) best practices. This post deals with web services to come up with general and specific tips that can be used by web services that are implemented using Java and JEE. This is how the post suggests one goes about SOA and BPM. The first thing is to decide well in advance the approach to web service development. This decision should be based on the requirements and constraints. This will help users understand a solution that best suits their requirement. The approach could include top-down or contract first, bottom-up, or meet-in-the middle. Top-down is where the contract of the web Service is WSDL and the design comes as a 'Given fact'. With a bottom-up implementation, web service artifacts such as its WSDLs are generated and one can expose existing components as web service. With the meet-in-the-middle approach, the user needs to define the contract and implementation to eventually create the glue between them. Compliance is also important with the SOA and BPM best practices. The paper suggests that a web service that isn't standards-compliant cannot be reused as appropriately as one would expect. So one needs to ensure that the web service is compliant to the WS-* standards by using the WS-I profiles (Web Services Interoperability Organization).