Standardized Service Contracts

Read any book on SOA and you will see a statement like this, "Standardized Service Contracts are key to success of you SOA initiative". I could not agree more, but take that same book and try to find an example that works for you and "Good Luck" is all I can say to you. 

So why is that?  Simply you don't start with the service contract. You start by establishing some standards that all Service Contracts must support. 

For example you could say:

1) All external access when we only control our web service such as with partners will be via HTTP/SOAP

2) All web pages we publish will use HTTP/REST 

3) All inside the firewall message traffic will be via Websphere MQ

This sets the base for all service contracts. 

Further you can specify one or more schemas that control the data such as:

A) All internal messages will use the Universal Data Transport Object schema at http://mydomain.com/UDTO 

B) The UDTO Payloads will be one of the departmental Schemas stored in the service registry, such as http://mydomain.com/fin for the Finance department

This sets the protocol and centralizes the Schemas. 

Watch this blog for more details to come.