Service orientation is becoming the leading paradigm of contemporary software. The paradigm has been well known and successfully used in some domains like process control for decades.
It is, however, a new paradigm in business scopes for many people and many software vendors. We discuss some implications of this fact.
We study patterns in service-oriented methodology, partly in comparison with patterns in object-oriented methodology. We mainly discuss systems called confederation using a document transfer protocol like SOAP-literal.
Most important patterns for confederations are user (business) oriented service interfaces, reuse of legacy systems, and the use of so-called architecture services.