Comparing the Impact of Service-Oriented and Object-Oriented Paradigms on the Structural Properties of Software

Abstract

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a promising approach for developing enterprise applications. While the concept of SOA has been described in research and industry literature, the techniques for determining optimal granularity of services and encapsulating business logic in software are unclear. This paper explores this problem using a case study developed with two contrasting approaches to building enterprise applications that utilise services, where one of the approaches employs coarse-grained services developed based on the principles of Object-Orientation (OO), and another approach is based on embedding business rules and logic into executable BPEL scripts and constructing a system as a set of fine-grained services. The quantitative comparison based on a set of mature software engineering metrics showed that a system developed using the BPEL-based approach has a potentially higher structural complexity, but at the same time lower coupling between software modules compared to an OO approach. It was also shown that some of the existing software metrics are inapplicable to SOA, hence new metrics need to be developed.

Simple Metric for Assessing Quality of Service Design

“…The use of fine-grained services, on the other hand, may result in complex interaction dialogues and a complicated failure recovery [17]. Studies have confirmed that fine-grained services produce loosely coupled serviceoriented applications with good maintenance properties [26] and methodological frameworks have been proposed to support making decisions about the optimal level of service granularity for a given implementation scenario [25,27]. However, practitioners often make decisions about the level of service granularity using performance based heuristics, rather than a methodological framework.…”

The Impact of Software Development Strategies on Project and Structural Software Attributes in SOA

“…Also, coarsegrained services can improve network performance since they require less communication than fine-grained services. On the other hand, creating coarse-grained services introduces increased coupling and decreased cohesion [14], resulting in lower system quality in terms of maintainability, reliability, and efficiency. Therefore, project managers should make a trade-off in regards to expected granularity of services based on the particular project constraints.…”

A framework for locating service providers in service-oriented software systems

“…SOA promotes the loose coupling of software components and enables sourcing of software as virtual hardware resources [6]. The work in [5] provides an assessment of software architecture that identifies when to rely on object-orientated and when to utilize serviceoriented in building an enterprise application.…”

“…It supports the communication of a set of services to perform tasks [4]. It is an approach for constructing integrated enterprise software systems that employs services [5]. SOA promotes the loose coupling of software components and enables sourcing of software as virtual hardware resources [6].…”