Many of those now designing and building services are stuck on what design patterns to apply to services. Keep in mind services are not applications, nor are they APIs. They are a small granular part of an application, and indeed a functional component, that should fit into many consumers, composites, processes, or applications. Get me? Thus, the core feature that a service needs to support is the ability to w Many of those now designing and building services are stuck on what design patterns to apply to services. Keep in mind services are not applications, nor are they APIs. They are a small granular part of an application, and indeed a functional component, that should fit into many consumers, composites, processes, or applications. Get me? Thus, the core feature that a service needs to support is the ability to work and play well deep inside of many different things, albeit being an external entity that’s remotely hosted. While most of the “predicted use” of services is known, many are not know. Thus, services should be designed with this in mind. However, in order for services to be truly useful they need to logically layer deeply into the application or composite that’s leveraging the service, indeed becoming a functional component that is near native. To that end, the deeper a service can integrate or couple with the consumer, the more value that service will bring to the consumer and the SOA as a whole. Considering that what I just said is true, the value of a service is directly related to its ability to layer into a consumer with near native capabilities. However, most of those designing and building services are focusing more on the “loose coupling” features, and create service that drive more towards logical agreement and not deep integration. This could be a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for loose coupling when it comes to SOA, however the dimension of loose coupling may not, and should not, extend to the way services interact with consumers. Instead the focus should be on deeper integration, using different degrees of coupling, where the design patterns of the service have more value. Service coupling that means deeper meshing with the points of integration, more complex interfaces, and better coordination between service and consumer, thus more native appearing and thus having much more value. The whole dimension of services design needs more focus, if you ask me. We’re missing the boat on some larger issues here. Software Development