What's Web 2.0 have that SOA doesn't?
Judith Hurwitz recently weighed in on the Web 2.0 phenomenon, observing that it has some of the echoes of the recent dot-com era: "...there were problems. First, most of the companies entering the market had no business model at all. The entrepreneurs in the space all looked to a handful of companies that had first mover advantage and were able to become leaders. ...Fast forward to Web 2.0. Entrepreneurs in this market look at some of the early successes like YouTube, My Space, and Facebook and see dollar signs. However, most of the companies yearning for billions actually have no commercial business model."
Nevertheless, Hurwitz continues, "Web 2.0 completes one of the key components of a service-oriented architecture – the interactive presentation and collaboration services. In fact, this will be one of the foundational ways that customers will create collaborative composite applications."
Web 2.0 carries with it a number of qualities that can speed along SOA projects: the ability to have Web pages continuously refresh, leveraging the XML-based Ajax development platform to support iterative client development, the ability to create Web applications without server interactions or dependencies, and the ability to link components together into mashups, or client-driven composite applications.
Hurwitz predicts that Web 2.0 will evolve out of the adolescent and 20-something "cool" space to ultimately shake up the more stodgy enterprise environment. "One of the impacts of Web 2.0 is that it begins to turn the balance of power upside down," she writes. "It enables emerging companies without a vast infrastructure to begin to create compelling software that can appear on the Web. This will be aided by the emerging business model of Web 2.0 – short development cycles where the community provides feedback to the developers."
Let me add that there is another case of deja vu all over again is happening here as well. Before SOA was SOA, it was XML Web services -- created in response to the demands of the dot-com, e-commerce driven culture that emerged in the late 1990s. (And really never went away.) The original intent of XML Web services was to smooth the interactions between e-commerce sites. XML was the lingua franca that would bring industries together, while services such as UDDI registries would act as the "Yellow Pages" of global e-commerce. The entrepreneurial frenzy that is taking place around Web 2.0 will soon be coming to an enterprise near you.
ebizQ is hosting a Webcast, led by Gartner's David Mitchell Smith and moderated by ebizQ's Beth Gold-Bernstein, on the convergence of Web 2.0 and SOA. Details on the Webcast, to be presented October 31st at 12:00 p.m. US Eastern Time, are posted here.
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