SOA principals - should a service call another service?

Question

I'm new to SOA (and to Stack Overflow too...)

Some services and web applications we are developing must all log audit information. We are considering an audit service for this. Is there any SOA governing principal that should make me think twice about having one of the services call the audit service to log information? A service-to-service call in other words?

Answer 1

As a matter of fact, yes.

A Service should call another Service when appropriate. There are parts of the WS-Standard that specify when and how this should occur:

SOA Sepcifications - WS-* Specs

If I remember correctly, you'll want to take a look at WS-Coordination