How to tap into the largest SOA in the world
Despite mega-investments in a variety of integration technologies and strategies (including SOA), businesses have seen very little return for their efforts. That's the view of ZDNet blogging colleague Dion Hinchcliffe, not to mention plenty of other industry observers.
However, unlike the naysayers, Dion says all is not lost. While traditional SOA (based on SOAP and WSDL Web services) really haven't proven to be agile solutions, things will be different with the new generation of SOA that is emerging.
Don't call it SOA, however -- the appropriate term is WOA, or Web-Oriented Architecture. WOA leverages the World Wide Web, which Dion describes as "the largest SOA presently in existence." The services that are built for WOA are built from lightweight Web 2.0 standards and methodologies, especially REST and enterprise mashups. He also describes enterprise-based SOA as "local networks."
Dion discusses the differences between SOA and WOA in more detail. He notes that "both approaches leverage HTTP, self-describing data formats such as XML, are concerned about the use of open standards, and can be used to build systems of arbitrary complexity." However, while SOAs "tend to have a small and well-defined set of endpoints through which many types of data and data instances can pass, WOAs tend to have a very large and open-ended number of endpoints; one for each individual resource. Not an endpoint for each type of resource, but a URI-identified endpoint for each and every resource instance."
He also observes that while "SOA was designed from the top-down by vendors to be tool friendly, WOA was emerged form the bottom up from the Web naturally, and has the best support in simple procedural code and an XML parser." Plus, very importantly, while "traditional SOA is fairly cumbersome to consume in the browser and in mashups, WOA is extremely easy to consume just about anywhere."
Dion has tapped into a rich convergence that is drawing the worlds of Web 2.0 and SOA closer together. Making service development and management easier for business users increases the chances of SOA success -- SOA is supposed to be business-driven, after all.