We are developing a LOB application using Silverlight and several team members are advocating the use of the canonical design pattern instead of creating simple WCF services. As the lead, I’m trying to balance best practices with an incredibly tight time line.
Here are the reasons I do NOT think Canonical is a good approach for our project.
We have no immediate (<5 years) requirement to expose any internal services to the enterprise.
Time required for governance. (Developing adapters with data transformation logic, developing XSDs, and developing contracts [fault, data, and operation]).
No need to expose a different data contracts than what exists in the data layer
It doesn’t appear that we can easily use ‘self tracking entities’ with the Canonical approach.
Here are some reasons I’m considering using Canonical approach.
We can use the XSD schemas for data type and length validation.
We will be prepared to allow consumption of our services to the enterprise, whether it’s 5 years or 1 year.
We can feel good that we’re implementing best practices. :)
So, is it advisable to follow the Canonical approach with a Silverlight application? It does not seem that the benefits Canonical provide out weigh the additional work. …or perhaps I’m wrong and it’s not additional work.
I think you should definitely go with WCF RIA services. It's extensible in every point possible, it's fast to develop, it's accessible as regular WCF services, it also has plenty different available end point types, and generally very mature. And implements best practices, and validation process is fully customizable. It really is a no brainer, if you have some additional questions about it shoot away, i'll gladly answer them:)
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I was looking at how you can create a WCF data service around an entity framework context and you can consume it as an EF context as well.
Creating an OData API for StackOverflow including XML and JSON in 30 minutes
I really just started looking at this, but I was wondering where would the business logic go? As a service I would expect that you couldn't just freely add/delete etc without it having some validation.
If I wrote an MVC app to consume this service, how would I best implement business logic. Not simple property level validation that you could do with attributes, but more complex stuff that needs to check the data store first etc.
It sounds like you need a custom data service provider (msdn link). They're quite powerful and give you full control over all of your reading/writing logic.
For example I wrote one that enforces our licensing logic in the update provider.
You can put some in the Data Service class, but you are limited as to what you can and can't do there. And then of course you can put some in the client above the service, but that's not ideal either.
I've only spent a few weeks with WCF Data Services but you highlight (one of) the big problems with it - lack of flexibility. It's fantastic for rapid development and banging out LOB applications, but anything with a deliberate design is very difficult to implement. I needed to include objects in my entity model simply to allow them to be exposed through the service, and I had huge headaches just trying to extend those classes with a simple property.
I'd only recommend using WCF Data Services for trivially simple applications that needed extremely fast development - a one or two day development cycle, for example. Anything else is worth doing thoroughly with regular WCF services, writing your own data layer and so on.
Depending on your specific needs, it sounds like Web API might be a good fit. Web API may never get the full range of OData support that WCF Data Services has, but it does make certain things easier (like adding business logic). I'm quite confident that Web API's initial support for OData will cover a significant number of use cases, and that support will grow over time.
While a custom data provider will most certainly do about anything you want and may well be a great solution for you if you have a complex architecture, I wasn't really thrilled when I attempted to save back through the client and found out I had to implement my the IUpdatable Interface as part of my Context.(I was attempting to build a repository pattern out of my context and DataService).
I'm sure it's very useful for many people, but I really only needed the functionality the EntityProvider already contained and didn't have the time in my project schedule to figure the Iupdatable piece of the custom provider out, so my team, specifically Geoff , stuck with the Entity Provider and used Change and Query Interceptors to route the DataService requests through our Business Logic classes on the server. It provides a central point of control. We used these to provide security checks, run calculations and other operations on Insert/Update, etc. Turned out great. You can also use service methods as another way to provide specific business logic functions to your clients.
My Team are evaluation to a bigger Business portal. (Invoicing, Bookkeeping, Salaries.....)
We are all used to work with DDD, O/R mappers with NHibernate as our first choice.
We have chosen to work with CompositeWPF to keep modularity between all modules and part system in the business portal.
Now we have evaluated Ria Services and are kind of disappointed how it works in a Data Oriented way, Data Oriented can be good in a service oriented scenario, but we feel that we can with an Object Oriented approach to, and we feel that we can get an application with less complexity with the OO approach than the DO approach.
For example it doesn't allow Value Objects, Many-to-many relations, everything needs to have keys and so on.
We haven't looked at WCF Data Services yet so our question is WCF Data Services our answere? Does it integrate well with Silverlight 4? Can we work with it in a OO manner?
RIA / WCF is not about replacing O/R mappers etc. It is about exposing data in an open format to another application. Not high end, but basically for integration. It is IMHO pretty stupid to put that within an application, but it is a great external interface, especially as it gets tooling support.
Good examples:
Bank accounting access. If I only could do home banking using Odata ;) And get my account statements into excel.
Trading ;) Yeah, ok - I have a trading server (that then connects to various brokers). I have a web front end. I now will expose certain data through OData, too, so I can easily get things out in excel etc., or even use a silverlight application for some stuff... but i will NOT use OData within one application to replace my object infrastructure- way too muc hoverhead.
Ebay could provide an OData interface for larger customers. Nice to get an overview over your auctions AND do some basic maintenance on your account. Nothing high performance, but again, TOOLING support. Excel, Report services all soon support OData.
If you look at it from that integration point of view it makes a LOT mroe sense. It is not a full environment - that "never" works. It is a great standardization, though, to open up an application with semantics (better than web services - standardized query and filter logic) AND tooling support.
I somehow dont really run into many problems with a lot of items you mention, though:
Anything I work with has a key per definition
I neve rdo many:many relations. I always havean interim object WITH A KEY.... so that I can add properties to it (and if that is only a timestamp).
The servies ARE data oriented, and seriously - I love them. I am a big OO fan, but the tooling support makes that a PERFECT external interface for applications.
I work for a large state government agency that is a tad behind the times. Our skill sets are outdated and budgetary freezes prevent any training or hiring of new employees/consultants (firing people is also impossible). Designing business objects, implementing design patterns, establishing code libraries and services, unit testing, source control, etc. are all things that you will not find being done here. We are as much of a 0 on the Joel Test as you can possibly get. The good news is that we can only go up from here!
We develop desktop CRUD applications (in C++, C#, or Java) that hit the Oracle database directly through an ODBC connection. We basically have GUI's littered with SQL statements and patchwork code. We have been told to move towards a service-oriented n-tier architecture to prevent direct access to the database and remove the Oracle Client need on user machines.
Is WCF the path we should be headed down? We've done a few of the n-tier application walkthroughs (like this one) and they seem easy to implement, but we just don't know enough to understand if we are even considering the right technologies. Utilizing the .NET generated typed DataSets seems like a nice stopgap to save us month/years of work (as opposed to creating new business objects from the ground up for numerous projects). Is this canned approach viable for a first step?
I recently started using WCF services for my Data Layer in some web applications and I must say, it's frustrating at the beginning (the first week or so), but it is totally worth it once the code is deployed.
You should first try it out with a small existing app, or maybe a proof of concept to make sure it will fit your needs.
From the description of the environment you are in, I'm sure you'll realize the benefit almost immediately.
The last company I worked for chose WCF for almost the exact reason you describe above. There is lots of good documentation and books for WCF, its relatively easy to get working, and WCF supports a lot of configuration options.
There can be some headaches when you start trying to bend WCF to work in a way not specifically designed out of the box. These are generally configuration issues. But sites like this or IDesign can help you through those.
First of all, I would definitely not (sorry for the emphasis) worry about the time you'll save using typed DataSet's versus creating your own business objects. That is usually not where you will spend most of your development time. I prefer using business objects myself.
In you're situation I would want to implement a proof-of-concept first. One that addresses all issues you may encounter. This proof-of-concept should implement an entire use case, starting on the client, retrieving data from the database and returning it to the client. You should feel confident about your implementation before continuing.
Then about choice of technology. WCF is definitely a good choice for communication between your client applications and the service layer. I suppose that both your clients as well as your service layer will become C# applications? That makes things a lot easier since interoperability between different platforms (Java/C# for example) is still not trivial although it should work in most cases.
Take a look at Entity Framework (as there are a couple Oracle providers available for it already) in conjunction with .NET 3.5 SP1 which enables built-in WCF serialization of your EF generated classes.
Here is a good blog to get started: http://blogs.msdn.com/dsimmons
CSLA might be a good fit for your N-Tier desktop apps. It supports WCF, has a large dev community, and is well documented. It is very object oriented.
What is the best practice for writing a rather large wcf service, containing a lot of OperationContracts and DataContracts?
How would I separate functional areas into several contracts, would it be best to create an endpoint for each functional area?
Is there any way to keep the source for the different parts apart, but still use only one service for all of them?
Where do I get good information how to plan the contracts, what to include, how to split...?
That's been a big question surrounding services since their inception. SOA done successfully is SOA planned to the extent you're talking about. Having said that, I've always leaned more toward splitting services out, but using them in a composite manner. That is, several endpoints when you have several contracts, but most of them are only consumed by a few endpoints that are consumed by non-service callers. (wow, that was a mouthful, did it even make sense?)
Also, I would advise to have as few contracts as possible. Too many contracts can lead to poor manageability. Good contract design will help limit the number of endpoints and service calls. Removing OO concepts from contract design is one way of doing so. Contract design is a massive topic in itself, but suffice it to say that through good contract planning (up front), comes good service design.
Maarten Mullender writes a great blog on WCF design, and is a must read. There are also some great SOA/WCF books emerging as well.
Some good books:
Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation
Programming WCF
I'll go off the track here and say I've used monolithic WCF contracts, functionally separated contracts (with a maximum of ten methods along Juval's guidelines in his book), and I've also tried a message handling architecture where a service has a single method that takes a base message, and handlers that 'know' how to unwrap and process the message after it crosses the wire.
I'm a big fan of the latter if you've got .NET on both sides of the fence. Oren has a screencast on the idea with code. I don't know what your needs are but this is working for me.
http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2008/03/30/Hibernating-Rhinos-8--Going-Distributed-amp-Building-our-own.aspx
That said if you're already coming from "I need a large WCF service" then going to one method is probably not going to cut it for you. If that's true then Juval Lowy's Programming WCF Services is the standard you should uphold in your design.
This has been helpful to me it comes from the idesign.net website and it was authored by Juval Lowy:
WCF Coding Standard
I have a post here about how individual operations should differ from traditional code operations:
http://www.iserviceoriented.com/blog/post/Introduction+to+Service+Oriented+Architecture.aspx
You should end up only with operations for actual business events. If you ever stop and think "I need to enable transaction support on my web service" that means you haven't designed the operation with a wide enough scope. You should never have to enable web service transaction support.
I highly recommend Bill Poole's blog for higher level SOA concepts. Here's a post to get started:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BillPoolesCreativeAbrasion/~3/328955489/service-contract-stability.html
I know this is an old post but I am thinking of services in the same way as I think of objects in programming.
Keep them to their bare minimum for what they must do. Of course not to go to the extreme, but I am making my decisions based on data entities.
One service for Account, one for Product etc.
Not sure what anyone would think of that though...
I've inherited this really weird codebase where they've built an external web service over a bunch of internal web services just to add authentication/authorization using WS-Security, WS-Encryption, et al. Less than a month into this engagement, I'm already feeling the pain of coupling volatile components through rigid WSDL, esp considering some of them use WCF and other choose to go WSDL first. Managing various versions of generated proxies and wrappers at various levels is a nightmare!
I'll admit the design is over-complicated and could have been much better, but my question essentially is:
Would you ever build a web service just to provide a cross cutting concern over a bunch of services?
Would this be better implemented as web service handlers?
and lastly...
Would you categorize this under the Web Service Gateway pattern?
I saw that very thing being built one year ago. I almost cried when the team took months to build 4 web services, 2 of which simply wrapped other internal ones, using WCF and some serious encryption. The only reason they wrapped the internal ones was to change the potential error numbers coming back.
So, would I ever intentionaly do that? Nope.
Would it be better implemented as almost anything else? yep.
Would I categorize it under the WTF pattern? absolutely.
UPDATE:
One thing I just remembered is that there is an architecture called "Enterprise Service Bus" It's purpose is to provide a common interface into other SOA systems. This way it doesn't matter what the different applications use for their end point mechanisms (WCF, WSE 1/2/3, RESTful, etc).
BizTalk is one example of an ESB and there are many other off the shelf programs that can be used. Basically, your app passes a message to the ESB and it handles sending that message, in a reliable way, to the other systems as well as marshalling any responses back.
This also means that you could insulate other applications from many types of changes to the end points. Of course, if the new end points require additional information, then you'd have to modify the callers. However, if all they are changing is the mechanism then a good ESB would be able to handle those changes without impacting your app.
I have seen similar implementations if you are exposing the services to the outside world and if you need to tighten down the security..check this MSDN column..