Best Practices for Service Interface Design in SOA, Part 1: Exploring the Development, Interfaces, and Operation Semantics of Services

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) emphasizes loose coupling between different systems within an enterprise. Service interface structure is of primary importance in SOA because poorly designed service interfaces can have a negative effect on all applications that need to use them. Well-designed service interfaces can accelerate project schedules and make the SOA solution more responsive to business needs. This paper is the first in a series that focuses on best practices for service interface design, including high-level aspects of development approaches, service granularity, and operation signatures. Subsequent papers in this series examine best practices for structuring Web Services Description Language (WSDL) documents and fault handling.