Goal: Use a more service oriented architecture that would support more than one interface

We already have the SOAP, the web interface and the Acceptance tests. The SOAP is not a fully developed service since it is mainly a database access service.

The example that would be addressed with this is the IDEA XPlanner plugin. That plugin allows time entry editing amongst other things. However there is no way for the plugin right now to know who are allowed as Pair for example. A TimeEntryService would provide all this information in addition to what the current interface provides.

The acceptance tests would also benefit from this. Too much of the setup is done through the web interface which is slow and prevent the tests from using the core model objects as fixtures. Providing a decoupled service interface to common actions would allow the ATs to totally bypass the view tier while keeping the same behavior. Right now some tests are going directly to the business objects and persist them but that short-cirtuit some behavior (different default values, cross cutting behaviors like history...)