On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 1:26 PM, Martin Fowler martinfowlercom@gmail.com wrote:
The term pops up in some different places, so it's hard to know what it means without some context. In PoEAA I use the pattern Service Layer to represent a domain-oriented layer of behaviors that provide an API for the domain layer. This may or may not sit on top of a Domain Model. In DDD Eric Evans uses the term Service Object to refer to objects that represent processes (as opposed to Entities and Values). DDD Service Objects are often useful to factor out behavior that would otherwise bloat Entities, it's also a useful step to patterns like Strategy and Command.
It sounds like the DDD sense is the sense I'm encountering most often. I really need to read that book.
The conceptual problem I run into in a lot of codebases is that rather than representing a process, the "service objects" represent "a thing that does the process". Which sounds like a nitpicky difference, but it seems to have a real impact on how people us