| A Service
is a callable routine that is made available over a network. Services
have well defined interfaces (inbound and outbound). The interfaces
are often published in a directory.
Optionally, directories are often utilized by a Consumer
(or requester) to discover available services. The Consumer may
then call the service to have some action performed.
The term Service is often interchanged with the
term, “provider”.
A provider is usually used in conjunction with Consumer to differentiate
between the entity that consumes a resource/result and the entity
that produces the resource/result.
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Services are often
compared to components. One difference that is usually noted is
that services are “live”. That is, they usually reside
inside of a multi-threaded engine that is network aware. The engine
allows multiple consumers to utilize the services and provides
some basic infrastructure (security, logging, etc.)
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