This is a good question. Why do people like ThoughtWorks make a lot of fuss about things like Services but then want to use things like the Repository pattern when writing code?

The short answer is that Service Orientation and Domain Driven Design have two slightly different concerns.

For example, in a transportation domain you don’t get a Truck from a Truck Service you get a Truck from the Garage or the Truck Manufacturer depending on whether you own it or are buying it. The point being that a Truck Service in Domain Design terms is meaningless, it is just something that programmers introduce to make their code easier for them to use.

If however you want to track where a Consignment is then it makes sense to offer this as a service. For a start it has different audiences; I might want to offer tracking to customers via the web and a slightly more detailed version of the service to the Customer Service Department.

In this sense the Tracking Service is actually a Domain item, people actually talk about the Tracking Service and the Service has been organised around the transactions and expectations that happen in the course of transporting goods.

I am not sure if it makes any sense to talk about a Service in your codebase if it does not have an external consumer for its functionality. Usually Service objects that only interact with your own code can be broken up and have their concerns divided in a different way so as to eliminate them. A Truck Finder for example might make sense, it would handle finding out whether a Truck was on the Road, in the Depot or in the Repair Shop. The Depot might then tell you whether the Truck was being loaded while the Truck could tell you how full it currently was.

Once you have identified external consumers for a service then you get into the question of Service Contracts and a lot of the good things about Service Architectures begin to apply. Limiting concerns, platform neutrality and service composition for example; but this involves a lot more than just tacking the word “Service” on the end of a class.