Web
services open the door to new integration opportunities and the quality of the
interface they expose is very important. For example, changing an interface
after it has been deployed can be a costly and messy task. So, it is very
important to pay attention to reliability, quality and extensibility of the
service. These are some of the points you can consider when designing and
developing a service.
1. Operation and data contracts should be designed in such a way that if possible, you can extend them without affecting existing consumers of the service.
2. Design against an Interface not vice versa. Design the service interface first rather than building application logics and then expressing that functionality through an appropriate service interface.
3. Implement validation logic to check all input based on value, range and type; and reject all invalid data.
4. Expose your WCF service both with basicHttpBinding and wsHttpBinding so that wide range of clients can consume it.
5. Try to use request objects instead of passing multiple parameters.
8. If possible, always publish the service to UDDI, so the service consumers can access the service by service name.
1. Operation and data contracts should be designed in such a way that if possible, you can extend them without affecting existing consumers of the service.
- If the existing
contracts cannot be extended, consider developing a different service for
new business requirements or new service clients.
- It is very
important to make sure that the service consumers are not blocked from
using your service after modifying or adding new functionality to your
service. This ensures the quality and reliability of your service.
2. Design against an Interface not vice versa. Design the service interface first rather than building application logics and then expressing that functionality through an appropriate service interface.
- If you design
interfaces first and know the purpose of those interfaces, it is easy to start
writing business functionalities under it. This also ensures the
consistency and reusability of service interface design.
3. Implement validation logic to check all input based on value, range and type; and reject all invalid data.
- If your service
consumers call your service with invalid requests, your service may fail
to respond or throw an exception inside your business logics and it may
very difficult to debug the issue.
- If you do not
capture invalid inputs and notify the service consumers for the service
failure, your service consumers may not know the reason why they did not
get a valid response.
4. Expose your WCF service both with basicHttpBinding and wsHttpBinding so that wide range of clients can consume it.
- Non .NET/legacy
clients only able to consume your service using basicHttpBinding.
5. Try to use request objects instead of passing multiple parameters.
- Having multiple
parameters can make it hard to maintain your service and it is also hard
for your service consumers to call your service.
6.
Returns an appropriate sized subset of the data rather than returning large
amount of the data in one call.
- It can result in
service timeout and also can frustrate the consumers of your service due
to latency of the response.
7. Use a
meaningful, business specific name as the service name.
- Consumers of
your service should be able to easily recognize your service based on its
main business functionality.
- Consistent
naming convention helps service consumers to easily recognize your
service.
- A consistent set
of services that cleanly establishes the level of clarity between the
services enables easier interoperability and reuse.
8. If possible, always publish the service to UDDI, so the service consumers can access the service by service name.
- If the consumers
of your service are not calling your service using UDDI service name, your
consumers may not able to access your service in case the host of your
service or the name of your service is changed.
