Working with clients who are consuming your services? Here is a mini-checklist of questions to ask:
- While executing request/reply on the service interface is there a timeout value set on the call?
- Is there code/logic to handle SOAP Faults /system exceptions when invoking the service?
- Is building service header separated from the payload? This will facilitate reuse across services that share common header parameters
- If there are certain error codes that the calling code can handle, is there logic for each of them?
- Is the physical end point information (URL string for HTTP, Queue connection and name for MQ/EMS) stored in an external configuration file?
- Is UTF-8 encoding used while sending XML requests to the service i.e. by making use of platform-specific UTF encoding objects?
- If using form-encoding are unsafe characters such as ‘&’, ‘+’, ‘@’ escaped using appropriate %xx (hexadecimal) values?
- While processing the service response is the logic for parsing/processing SOAP and service-specific headers decoupled from processing the business data elements?
- Is the entire request/reply operation – invocation and response handling logic – encapsulated into its own class or method call?
- While performing testing, is the appropriate testing environment URL/queue manager being used?
- Is a valid correlation id being used in the service request? This is very essential for aynchronous request/reply over JMS (JMS Header) or HTTP (callback handler)
Tagged: checklist, messaging, service orientation architecture, services, SOA, systematic reuse, web services