We're havng a bit of a disagreement in our team, and I would like to hear other people's views. We have a mature solution that uses an Entity Framework model, which is accessed by a repository layer, which is in turn accessed by a business logic layer. The BLL classes implement interfaces, which are also implemented by services in a WCF project. The WCF services are very thin wrappers around the BLL classes, and each service call is basically a one-liner that passes the call through to the BLL. We have a WPF project that uses the WCF services for its data access.We have recently added an ASP.NET MVC4 project to the solution, to provide web access to some of the features in the WPF project. As the web server is on the same local network as the SQL Server database and the WCF web folder, I added a reference to the BLL project from the MVC project, and did the data access directly between the MVC controllers and the BLL classes.Our senior technical chap objected to this, and said I was breaking SOA. He wants me to add WCF service references to the MVC project, and access the data via WCF.My argument against this is that going via WCF does not add anything of benefit to the MVC project, but hurts the performance (I know this for a fact, as I tried it). Given that the WCF services just pass the calls straight throuh to the BLL classes, which implement the same interfaces, I don't see how it is any more SOA to use WCF than to call the BLL methods directly. Furthermore, performance is critical in this MVC project, and I don't want to do anything that will impact the performance unless there is a very good reason to do so. I can't see any good reason here. Even if we optimise the WCF project, it is still always going to be slower than accessing the BLLs directly.According to the definitions of SOA that I've seen (for example, see the Definitions section in Wikipedia's SOA article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture), our BLLs are definitely within the pattern. I don't see any requirement to use web services to call it SOA. Sure, web services are a form of SOA, but they aren't the only form. As far as I can see, a layered approach, which ours defintely is, is completely compliant with the principle of SOA. Now I realise that I may not have put his argument very strongly, but that's mainly because I can't understand it. I'm hoping that some people who are more knowledgeable than me can come along and offer some comments one way or the other. We have a meeting to discuss this tomorrow, and I;m sure he's going to pressrue me very strongly to use WCF instead of referencing the BLLs directly. If he's right, then fair enough, we'll have to suffer the performance hit. However, if there isn't any benefit to using WCF in this case, then I need to be able to explain why the way I've done it so far is fully SOA.I would appreciate any comments.
Is this breaking SOA?
asp.net mvc;wcf;soa