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Business Processes Are Services Too

I've been having a conversation with Piyush Pant over on his blog that started as a comment he left on my Services Aren't Stateless post. He thinks that I'm "missing the crucial point here by implicitly conflating business process and service state". While Piyush hasn't really defined what he means by these terms, I think I understand what he's getting at. Yes, process and service state are different in many ways, but they are also similar in that they are both service private data.

Pat Helland (side note - I wish Pat would start blogging again) wrote an article some time ago titled Data on the Outside vs. Data on the Inside where he talked about the differences between service private data and data in the space between the services. For example, data on the outside is immutable, requires an open schema for interop, doesn't need encapsulation and is representable in XML. Service private data is not immutable, doesn't need an open schema for interop, requires encapsulation and is typically stored in a SQL RDBMS. So on this front, process and service state are both service private data so conflating them makes some sense.

However, what's not in the article is the idea of Resource and Activity data. Not sure why Pat didn't include this in the article, but he was talking about it as far back as PDC 2003. Stu Charlton described the difference between resource and activity data in his Autonomous Services article:

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