To make sense of the complexity of business
processes, data storage, and application
logic, we take the approach of condensing the focus of the framework to a set of
services.
Each service encapsulates some form of
process meaningful in the context of e-
learning, which can be delivered by any number of actual software components.
Service-level abstractions correspond
clearly to the notion of Web Services, with each
service capable of being defined by using the Web Services Description Language
(WSDL). However, this is only one possible interpretation of a service, and services
could be realised using a range of technologies.
The important point about services is
that we are not concerned, from the point of view
of the framework, with either how a service is implemented, or the processes it is used
in, but instead only with the set of defined interactions that a service supports. This
functional focus allows us to be specific about the range of expected behaviours of an
individual service, while remaining agnostic with regard to implementation technologies
and overall architecture of particular solutions.
