Separation of Policy from implementation or why I've turned on the human check

One of the basic rules of SOA is that you should keep the operational polices of a service separate from the logic. In other words the bits that dictate how, when and whom for a service are managed differently from the "what" of the service.

Today I've had to turn on the human check for comments as I've had a series of SPAM links put onto the blog. This is in effect implemented as a policy, changing the policy doesn't alter the implementation (i.e. the process of adding a comment) it just adds in an additional step that fulfills the policy requirement that there should be a person commenting.

This is why things like WS-Policy, WS-Security and the WS-RX group specifications are important. They keep the policy pieces away from the implementation pieces and enable you to manage them independently.

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