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It has often struck me as strange that while SOA is all about loosely coupling, the principle hasn’t often been extended to user interaction which after all is almost always at either or both the start and end of business processes. Instead even in a SOA environment, most enterprise users still interact almost all of the time with one application at a time through tightly coupled clients or browsers.

This neatly brings us back to the Web2.0 technologies which are after all primarily a revolution in user interaction and user interface. To narrow the focus a little, lets consider only the following elements of Web2.0:

- The evolution of browser based user interfaces (thanks to AJAX) into something richer and closer to the familiar desktop interface. This is exciting because client side computing hasn’t really changed since the browser first appeared in the late nineties.

- The concept of the mash-up as a combination of services into a single client-built interface has spread in the consumer web.

(While user interaction can be created through wikis and blogs, I won’t delve into these primarily knowledge management tools although they have a clear potential role to play in service definition/reuse and governance and I will focus on the social and collaborative implications of Web 2.0 in the next blog item in this series.)

The implication of much better user interfaces – and hence must more functionality embedded comfortably within those interfaces - and the ability to combine connections to multiple back-end systems as mash-ups has big implications in the enterprise: the client can now evolve towards being a peer of the back-end systems. Although clearly still a peer with limitations – it is now capable of initiating actions independent of a single system and capable of interacting with many systems in a much more intelligent way.

Furthermore because it is easy to create these interfaces and mash-ups, the client can become truly decoupled from the applications as they are now capable of rapidly adapting to handle new applications, new data feeds and new services.

A further implication of the simplicity (and productivity that I previously commented on) of some of the Web2.0 tools is that it creates the potential to take central IT function out of the implementation of these clients completely and instead focus them only on the associated governance issues: allowing less IT expert, but more business focused individuals to solve their problems themselves.

You may wonder whether this can actually happen: can non-IT people create their own interfaces. I don’t think the AJAX tools are even close to being mature enough to support this just yet – they are still built by techies for techies – unlike wikis and blogs which are usable by most people. However, I think the concept is completely plausible – look at the way Microsoft Excel is “programmed” by non-technical people to carry out very sophisticated calculations. Imagine if the same could be done with could be done with a end-user focused AJAX combined with an enterprise edition of myYahoo.

Posted by rbradley in SOA Predictions • SOA concepts • Web2.0 |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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Posted by: Tony Baer at June 6, 2006 03:39 PM