'WOA: the SOA that works'

"WOA: the SOA that works."

That's how fellow ZDNet blogger and analyst Phil Wainewright described the Web Oriented Architecture phenomenon that has been a topic of hot discussion as of late, at the latest Analyst BriefingsDirect podcast we just wrapped yesterday.

The podcast (audio available here) was led by fellow ZDNetter and analyst Dana Gardner of Interarbor Solutions, Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research; Tony Baer, principal at OnStrategies and blogger; Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis, and yours truly.

The consensus of our group was -- getting past the new Three Letter Acronym (TLA) being added to the lexicon -- WOA offers some very compelling propositions beyond traditional SOA as we've known it. WOA specs and standards are lightweight and simple, versus the more heavy-handed SOA-related specs, such as SOAP and WS-*.

Think of it as slowa-SOA versus WOA.

There was general agreement that SOA and WOA had a lot of common ground. As Brad Shimmin put it, they are "different sides of a Rubic's Cube. Jim Kobielus said that the "membrane" separating SOA on the inside and WOA on the outside was relatively thin, and getting thinner.