The role of congregation in service-oriented development

Although they are still being refined, the principles of service-oriented architectures have significant benefits for the maintenance and administration of enterprise systems. However, they are not particularly well suited for supporting the development of client applications and business processes. In particular, the absence of the notion of types, in the sense of abstract data types and object-oriented programming, limits the way in which client application developers can access resources in a service-oriented architecture and leverage reusable assets. In this paper we propose the notion of congregation as a key step and ingredient in service-oriented development that supports flexible deployment and usage of types in an enterprise system. We explain the need for congregation and provide a small motivating example of its application.