I am curious to find out how fellow SOA practitioners are handling the GUI in the SOA world.
The GUI is an interesting beast in SOA (and so is "reporting" for that matter). GUIs require customized information, tailored to particular screens. Now you can format information for the screen on the presentation layer in the GUI, but what if the UI needs more/different information than the service provides? To offer a crude hypothetical: consider a service that requires 10 items in an order to process that order in a specific domain, but the user interface requires 15 information items from the same domain. Now, one hates to modify the perfectly good business service specifically to satisfy the needs of one UI. I have seen the solutions of "presentation services", and have built a few myself....frankly; they don't really look much like services [they resemble pure old application APIs over SOAP http). So, fellow practitioners, how have you handled the requirements of an information rich user interface in your environments? -Regards Suhayl Masud http://www.linkedin.com/in/smasud
