Windows Communication Foundation - SOA

I have spent time this week learning about the WCF and it's place in jumpstarting SOA based application development while attending the SDWest Expo in Santa Clara. Juval Löwy provided most of the presentations on WCF; along with a few by his chief architect Michele Bustamante.

One of the main points Juval made was that WCF based development is an evolutionary shift from Component Oriented development to Service Oriented development. During an excellent history lesson on the growth of software development methodologies he made the case that services are the next major shift because they improve upon the goals of component development. The WCF improves primarily in decoupling: technology from the service provided; transaction and concurrency management; security; reliability, versioning, and communication protocols from the business logic. Because the WCF provides this great level of decoupling Juval declared with a mischevious smile, that coding in the CLR is coding in the stone-age. The WCF has arrived, and everything you code should now be coded as a service.

While we can't take this declaration entirely seriously - Mrs. Bustamante is more balanced -it is a fact that transaction support, protocol independence, security, reliability, versioning, and concurrency are provided for free by the WCF. Obviously all services decouple the technology and platform from the service provided - that's why the industry is in love with services - but the WCF adds so much more.

All this goodness is provided by implementation of the WS-* specifications by the WCF. That really makes it so much better in my opinion because it means that transactions, security, etc. can pass from a WCF service to any other which also implements those standards (IBM was part of the spec group, so I am sure their products will follow suit soon). You have to take some time to think about what this means to the way you can build software - we may have to agree with Juval that a fundamental shift is underway. This isn't about WCF causing a fundamental shift, SOA causes the fundamental shift. It's the easy use of the full range of WS-* standards which makes the WCF such an attractive reason to start thinking services more often than you ever have before - even if not for absolutely everything as Juval suggests.

If you aren't familiar with the WCF, the basics are very simple. The new ServiceModel namespace includes an attribute for ServiceContract which is placed on an interface, making that the contract for the web service. Each operation within the web service interface is attributed as OperationContract, exposing these members of the interface on the service. Every class type exposed in an operation signature must be attributed with DataContract to mark it as serializable. Given these few attributes, your classes are ready and you just need a little configuration. If you remember .net Remoting, then I suggest you forget it, but this will at least be familiar to you. I won't go into here, you can check out WCF configuration here.

If you are going to design more services, you have to take some things into account during design. I won't discuss the normal service design issues that exist in all services. However in WCF programming a couple of things got my attention. For instance, while you cannot expose an interface type as a contract operation variable, you can expose "well known types" which will enforce an object hierarchy. This will be slightly different from the pure OO interface and class design you might have used, but preserves the basic idea.

Also, when it comes to passing state data an object DAL is enforced by classes attributed as DataContract. This ensures serialization capabilities by the Framework. As a design consideration it simply means you have to have classes that hold simple data elements to pass across the service boundary. This isn't a bad thing, it just may be different than you would design for internal business objects. Mix with LINQ (in the near future) within your .net classes and you'll probably have these pure data objects in your design anyhow.

One final consideration concerning services everywhere is the issue of performance. Obviously, if you are going across the wire as SOAP/HTTP, you're subject to the inefficient payload as well as the potential wire latency. This is no different from any other service call. But, with every service call there is a serialize/deserialize operation for every object. I haven't tested this hit, but it will be something compared with the nothing of in-memory object passing.  So, if you are configured for SOAP/HTTP performance is already a potential problem and you'll never notice the performance of any other part of the WCF infrastructure code. If you are going binary/TCP, then the test would be worth the double-check.

Finally, if you are implementing WCF the folks at iDesign have a whole bunch of helper classes and utilities you should check out.