Service Oriented real world sample application in ASP.NET

Question

Hi,

I've read lots of articles about Service Oriented architecture.
Is there any real world sample application which is imeplemented in ASP.NET?

Thanks

Answer 1

The short answers is: not that I know of.

The other thing to keep in mind (which you're probably already aware of) is that the level of abstraction is very important.

One one level, the "Service" in SOA is Business Service - not a technicial service like a web service; in fact at this level the idea of implementation is completely irrelevant. This is more at the Enterprise Architecture and Buisness Architecture level.

Lower-down, there's what you might call Service Orientated Design, where software systems are built in a way that is service based - it offers something that is easily consumed by other systems (or consumes a service in much the same way). Even at this point we're not talking about implementation specific things like technologu - it's just more of a mindset - how the system is arranged (the architecture).

The next level down is where software systems offer services as physical end-points that are defined by an address, binding and contract (The ABC of SOA).

At this level you will be able to find implementations; NServiceBus comes to mind (not that I have used it) - but you don't need a service bus to do "Service" orientated architecture.

Finally, I'm not sure exactly how you view ASP.NET in the context of your question. If you're .Net based then WCF is the place to start looking; one of the binding types is a web-service, which being web-based kind of comes under the umbrella of ASP.NET. Alternatively if you're building a website or web-application then the services that the application offers or consumes would be located in a data access or services layer - loosely-coupled to the Business Logic (BL) layer - so they aren't actually directly related to the fact you're doing a web-application at all, as this architecture woudl work for different kinds of application (not just web).