Application of data engineering techniques to design of message structures for web services
George Feuerlicht · UTS ePRESS (University of Technology Sydney) · 2005
Abstract. Unlike components, Web Services are primarily intended for inter-enterprise applications that use Internet as the underlying transport mechanism, and consequently are subject to a different set of design considerations than in-tra-enterprise applications. Most practitioners recommend the usc of coarse-grained. message-oriented Web Service that minimize the number of messages and avoid the need to maintain state information between invocations. In this paper we argue that excessive usc of coarse-grained, document-centric message structures results in poor reuse and undesirable interdependencies between ser-vices. We describe a design approach that provides a framework for designing message payloads for service-oriented applications. We treat the problem of message design from a data engineering perspective and apply data normaliza-tion techniques to the design of service interfaces. We eonsidcr the impact of increasing message granularity on cohesion and coupling of service operations and discuss the associated design tradcoffs. 1