In my team we were talking about services and then the web services, and when I was talking to a friend of mine about the services stuff, he posted a blank question. "What is a service? and how different is that from a method”. His question is correct, I feel that most of the people who design services in this complex computing world are not still clear what is a service and not sure of how different is a programming language methods from the service and what it is intent to do?

What is a service?

Lets start exploring the service. Let me take you to the understanding of what does a service means in the real world and how is that transformed into the computing world. Consider a simple banking situation, where the customer is willing to get some service to fulfil his / her needs. interaction between a customer and the service provider A person needs to deposit some money into the account of the person. Hence , deposit is a service provided by the bank to make customer safe guard the money into the bank’s vault. Similarly, withdrawal, money transfers etc., are some of the service provided by a service provider i.e bank.

In layman's term , A service is "an act of assistance".

But some service oriented company, does exactly same job as this.

source: dealer refresh

So, you place computers in the place of humans. But still, how do you make sure that the computers perform the same task as of humans ( of-course, not the one like above ) and deliver the expected service as good as a human ( is it?? ). Hence this will lead to define some of the characteristics of good service.

Characteristics of a good service.

This table give you an complete idea on how a delivered service should be. Just gathering together.

I will detail out the each of the characteristics in the next article.

[ Updated: Updated the description of the “State” of the service ]