Service Integration Engineering: A Paradigm Shift in Software Engineering

The engineering field has taken on many new disciplines as our scientific knowledge has grown. The latest discipline in this is software engineering. Service Oriented Architecture, and in a broader sense, Service Oriented Computing have influenced Information and Communication Technology towards a design of uncoupled yet coherent architectures of services. Hence, it would be fair to say that Service Oriented Computing is software development with services where existing services are composed and configured to create new composite services and applications. The basis for service composition is often a workflow, which is a logical sequence of activities that, together, model a coherent business process. As a result of that, a new engineering paradigm has been emerging from within the software development trend towards the Service Oriented Computing, which in this paper referred to as Service Integration Engineering. This paper is intends to identify distinctive attributes of such paradigm and the circumstances that may have been instrumental in giving rise to this new paradigm. We intend to establish whether the past and current trend towards building software applications or larger systems entirely from pre-defined building blocks calls service does in fact represent a paradigm shift in software engineering or it is just a temporary methodological shift to use certain pattern that would soon vanish with the emergence of other patterns.