Java Reference
In-Depth Information
or notification capability. A functional service might act as a centralized rules engine or
security service.
It is important for such services to be as autonomous as possible.
Process service
A process service represents a series of related tasks. These tasks may be carried out with-
in the boundaries of a single business domain, across multiple business domains, or across
organizations. A process service can be represented as an orchestration invoked by an
ESB, with a coarse-grained contract that causes the process service to appear as a unified
whole to clients.
One example is the processing of an invoice. Process compositions may become even
more complex, composing other processes. An example of this might be a New Hire ser-
vice that defines a process around intake of new employees, which is an entity service.
But such a service might also call on an IT infrastructure provisioning service to light up
a new workstation for the employee. Along the way, it could also use a functional service
to send an email and another functional service that handles errors.
While such categories may not organize your physical service inventory or development pro-
ject setup, it can be useful to understand what kind of service you are working on in order to
help organize your approach and steer conversations with other developers and analysts. Ar-
chitects may want to note such distinctions on their models.
