Process-centric Services in a SOA architecture (supported by wwf)
Hi
I′m reading the book Enterprise SOA - Best practices. I′m also playing around with WWF and this has lead to at least one question so far.
The book describes one kind of services in a SOA as Process-Centric Service which encapsulates the business logic for an organisation. The service often maintains state for their clients to simplify the local client logic.
Ok. I can clearly see how WWF can support the logic and state in a local application (WWF directly integrated in the client application). But would it be reasonable to wrap the process-centric service into a Web service (weare talking SOA) and describe a complex Business Logic here which would be composed of a high amount of steps which often would require the interaction with the front end?
As I see it, it would problably be a State based workflow which was stimulated by inputs when neccesary eg by web service calls propagating as events to the workflow. But then i see a fundemental flaw. The general "workflow semantic" would have to be equal both in the Proces service AND the front end application. It has to know when to give the right inputs to the service. We then has to "duplicate" the workflow both on client and in the service.
I guess my real question is. How could the Front-end application adobt to the process service workflow? Eg. when in "Order send and closed state" the button "Ship order" on the front end should be disabled? Would we Poll the workflow? Make the workflow/web service call OUR front end..eg with a call back..(no i guess).
I don't know what my REAL qustion is, but I just can?t see how we could have a statefull process service controlling/directiing our front-end apps.
Any inputs on this matter would really be appriciated.
