There's been quite a bit of chatter about the rising Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) phenomenon across the blogosphere and analystsphere in recent months; particularly as it may represent the next generation of SOA approaches.
Dion Hinchliffe, a colleague over at ZDNet, has been talking about WOA and Enterprise 2.0-enabled SOA long before everyone else, and he recently had some interesting points to make about what he feels is an impending SOA-to-WOA transition.
As Dion put it:
SOA is increasingly in the firing line for less-than-stellar results and lack of business alignment. Few promising solutions for this have emerged lately, with the increasingly notable exception of WOA. WOA describes a compelling new focus that can address many existing SOA issues, but is sometimes at odds with traditional IT and business thinking.... SOA (of which WOA is a part) hasn’t looked this interesting in years. But like most new ideas, it inevitably faces challenges from the old guard.
Dion defines WOA as an architecture "being driven by the widespread success that lightweight Web services — and particularly their use in open APIs — are having on the open Web." WOA builds upon approaches such as mashups, REST, Ajax, and cloud computing.
WOA offers the same service-enablement of applications across business units that has been promoted through SOA. "Like many aspects of Web 2.0, WOA is not complex or overly expensive, it’s a way of thinking about interacting over the network and all the classic SOA principles still apply, which just create and expose them differentl," Dion says.
However, unlike the cautious and tepid advances seen with SOA, WOA has caught on like wildfire.
Dion cautions that the on-the-fly nature of WOA projects is creating applications that don't have a solid grounding in the enterprise. "Many organizations I talk to are already using some WOA to some degree on the ground today, it’s just not being promoted like traditional SOA is, thereby missing the benefit of the support, documentation, guidance, management, and infrastructure/tools support needed to fully flourish," he observes.
Dion provides some advice for companies looking to engage WOA:
Learn about WOA. "Study the technology (HTTP, REST, syndication, open Web APIs, widgets, metadata documentation, Ajax, mashups, JSON, etc.), as well as the business and implementation side, including partner ecosystems, developer support sites, monetization, and chargebacks."
Adapt WOA to your organization. "Every organization will have a landscape of existing SOA approaches and technologies that WOA approaches will need to be added to."
Conduct a pilot. "Select a mashup platform that works well for your organization and try it out. WOA enables SOA to be used in a much more agile, open, and effective manner."
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