Fine Grained vs Coarse Grained BPEL

At a customer this past week, the team was examining the WSDL that had been defined for a new project. The WSDL was broken into three definitions but was going to provide aggregation capabilities for a single consumer. Since the consumer portion was already under development, there was a strong desire to limit the number of changes made to the interfaces. The first discussion was whether to use the several interfaces as separate services or to boil them down into one interface. If this was done, do we just map the current operations onto the WSDL interface or do we replace them. The current services were pretty fine grained providing specific capabilities for search. The results returned were represented as different elements with no consistency. Two options were then explored:

1) Create a single WSDL that had N number of operations matching the current operations that were currently spread across several WSDL.

2) Blow up the WSDLs and start from scratch creating a coarse grained interface that provided a single search operation. For the Web Service implementation, it would need to examine the query data to determine which type of search was being requested or a new element with an enumeration of search types could be added.

In both cases, revisiting the schema and collapsing the numerous elements that existed previously into a query input and search result was agreed upon.

To demonstrate the impact of solution 1 or 2, we then turned to BPEL and developed the service implementation as a BPEL Service. Why BPEL, well this service was meant to aggregate data from various sources depending on the input.

If we examine solution 1, the WSDL would have 8 operations. One option to support this was the use of a the Pick Activity and OnMessage Activity. One OnMessage per operation could be employed creating processing pipe creating an Event Driven design.

If we examine solution 2, the WSDL would have a single operation and thus would support a more traditional Receive/Reply Activity.

So in essence, the use of a Fine Grained WSDL impacted/reduced the options for BPEL development, whereas Coarse Grained WSDL did not.