System of Development Patterns in Service-Oriented Software

Service orientation is the leading paradigm of contem-porary software. Each paradigm has specific practices and a specific set of design and development paradigms. For service orientation it holds too. We show that service ori-entation is a quite complex trend: There are several types of service-oriented architectures (SOA). The various SOA types may have different domain of application, different patterns and antipatterns, they can use different model-ing and development techniques. Proper selection of SOA type can be a crucial task significantly influencing likeli-hood of project success. The applicability of individual SOA variants depends on requirements and on general busi-ness circumstances like staff knowledge, planned business alliances, and the need to reuse existing software. The pro-per selection of a SOA variant is an important pattern often made by the way. It is important that some patterns can de-pend on the effects of the other ones. Patterns should there-fore be orchestrated. We discuss here mainly the patterns for the variant of SOA called confederation where com-munication partners need not be looked for. Most impor-tant patterns for confederations are user (business) oriented service interfaces, reuse of legacy systems and third-party products, and the use of so-called architecture services. Architecture services can serve as message transformers, heads of composite services, process managers, and inte-gration constructs for the integration in the large. All ar-chitecture services discussed in this paper can be viewed as instances of one generalized concept from Petri nets