Chapter 15: Exploring the Service Factory Pattern

Overview

The service factory pattern has its roots in classic object-oriented design patterns such as the Abstract Factory pattern from the Gang of Four's book, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley, 1995). The idea is simple: You should isolate points of variability into contained, easily manageable blocks of code. For example, the P.T. Monday Coffee Company application can use one of several different bean suppliers to provide raw beans that it subsequently roasts and sends to customers. Deciding which supplier to use is a point of variability and should therefore be isolated to its own module of code. However, the interface to any supplier's ordering Web Service should not be a point of variability and should adhere to a single interface. The code to interact with a service can therefore remain in the primary code path. The Service Factory pattern isolates the code for deciding which supplier's Web Service to use. The Web Service pattern implementation returns an architecture adapter to the service that the factory decided on and allows the primary code path to continue without any customization.

The Service Factory pattern is a critical pattern to use as you move the P.T. Monday Coffee Company application from a simple, monolithic application to a truly dynamic application. The Service Factory pattern facilitates your ability to choose the best business partner for a particular transaction at runtime rather than at implementation time. For example, rather than having a single bean supplier, the service factory isolates code that chooses which bean supplier to use at runtime. The choice criteria could be as simple as choosing from a predefined list or as complex as searching a Universal Description, Data, and Discovery (UDDI) directory for a potential business partner for each transaction.

In this chapter, you will use the Service Factory pattern to abstract your application away from the details of choosing a partner's Web Service. Before using the Service Factory pattern to the desired effect, you must understand some aspects of your environment. Specifically, you will re-examine the importance of common interfaces in Web Services as well as the importance of UDDI to facilitate your searches for business partners . After this groundwork , you will look at the pattern structure and a sample implementation based on the Asynchronous Business Process pattern discussed in Chapter 9, "Exploring the Asynchronous Business Process Pattern."