How do you keep SOA DRY?
- by TaylorOtwell
In our organization, we've shifted to a more "service oriented architecture". To give an example, let's assume we need to retrieve a "Quote" object. This quote has a shipper, a consignee, phone numbers, contacts, email addresses, and other location information. In other words, a Quote object is made up of many other objects.
So, it seems like it would make sense to make a "Quote Retrieval Service". In our situation, we've accomplished this by creating a .NET solution and writing the service. The service API looks something like this (in pseudo-code):
Function GetQuote(String ID) Returns Quote
So, so far so good. Now, when this service is consumed, to keep things "de-coupled", we are creating essentially a duplicate of the Quote object and mapping from the QuoteService version of the Quote into the consumer's version of the Quote. In many cases, these classes will have the exact same properties.
So, if the Quote service is consumed by 5 other applications, we would have 6 definitions of what a "Quote" is. One for each consumer, and one for the service. This feels wrong. I thought code was supposed to be DRY, but it seems like our method of SOA is forcing us to create tons of duplicated class definitions. What are we doing wrong, or is the code duplication just a "necessary evil" of SOA?
