Engineering Services
Service engineering, also called service-oriented software engineering, is a software engineering process that attempts to decompose the system into self-running units that either perform services or expose services (reusable services).
Service oriented applications are designed around loosely-coupled services, meaning there are simple standards and protocols which are followed by all concerned, while behind them are a wide variety of technological services which can be far more complex.
The reusable services are often provided by many different service providers, all of whom collaborate dynamically with service users and service registries.
There are three types of actors in a service-oriented environment. These are:
- Service providers: These are software services that publish their capabilities and their availability with service registries.
- Service users: These are software systems (which may be services themselves) that use the services provided by service providers. Service users can use service registries to discover and locate the service providers they need.
- Service registries: These are constantly evolving catalogs of information that can be queried to see what type of services are available.