Consuming Enterprise Services  

In the Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture, you have one or more service providers on the one side and one or more service consumers on the other. The service providers offer certain business functions as services and publish their interfaces.

The services should be described in such a way that they can be easily found and used in various applications. Consumers usually avail of several services that may come from multiple service providers in order to create new functions. This is called service composition or service orchestration.

The consumption of services is divided into the following steps:

●      Searching for Services

When using services, we distinguish between the service provider and the service consumer.In the simplest case, we can assume that the service provider—the person who provides the services—knows the service requestor and informs the latter where services can be found. However, this contradicts the idea of a global service platform. What makes the use of Web Services attractive is the idea that applications can be built from services that are available in a central registry. This service can be provided with the Services Registry.

The ES Workplace in the SAP Developer Network (SDN) provides a central source of information for getting to know Enterprise Services. It has a publicly available Services Registry.

Browse the enterprise services that are offered in the ES Workplace of the SAP Developer Network (at sdn.sap.com → Enterprise SOA → Explore Enterprise Services). By reading the detailed documentation of the enterprise services you can decide which services are useful in your applications.

●      Consuming Services

Services can be consumed in the following areas:

○       Java EE Applications (Developing Java EE 5 Applications)

○       Web Dynpro for Java (Developing User Interfaces with Web Dynpro for Java)

○       Visual Composer  (Modeling Composite Views with Visual Composer)

○       Composite Applications (Composing Services with CAF)

○       Guided Procedures (Designing Composite Processes with Guided Procedures)