Architecting systems with components and services

Complexity has been one of the key challenges to the architecture, design, and implementation of large-scale and distributed enterprise applications. Object-oriented design overcame many of the scalability issues of previous technologies by applying encapsulation and inheritance. As systems became larger and more complex, classes and objects turned out to be too fine-grained and cumbersome to capture the structures and behaviors of these systems. Component-based software engineering techniques were proposed to further raise the level of abstraction. Recently, the growing demand for Internet computing imposes new challenges. Software systems are required to be more distributed and loosely coupled. The service-oriented aspects of these network-based systems further complicate their architecture and design. This paper presents a software architecture that addresses the above issues by combining the strength of component-based and service-based design methodologies. Experiences from the deployment of enterprise applications based on this architecture are presented.