MEP diagrams in SOA

Because I didn’t blog on Friday, December 9, 2011

So, after searching the Thomas Erl cathedral (www.soapatterns.org) I can’t really find anything focused on the message exchange pattern. Of course, for SOAP, the MEP is all tied up with the WSDL (“Port type”, isn’t it… it’s been a while…). Basically you get a one way, duplex or reqest-response pattern. But, for the most part the diagrams seem to focus on things like:

Service composition

Service composition and internal structure

API (even when the pattern is about messaging)

 

So I gave up and headed over for MSFT to see if there was anything used to document the WCF world. But not really any joy there either. There are a few bits and pieces but no standard approach to capturing the messages:

Explaining a duplex pattern

Thinking about the service internals again

I suppose, after all, it’s “Service” Oriented Architecture – not Message oriented. People who are doing it seem to just stick to the Sequence diagram.

So much for that.