Ronan Bradley's FinanceTech Directions

The war has broken out again between proponents of a Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) and SOA. I say war has broken out but really the vast majority of the fighting is coming from the WOA community. Frankly, I find much of this a little bit silly as it really comes back to horses for courses. (If you want to catch up on the debate in detail, Joe McKendrick has been covering it over here )

Reading some of the commentary, I get an awful feeling of déjà vu on a number of fronts:

Firstly, there is a continued tendency among those who don’t like SOA to lump it together with Web Services and the WS-* standards. To be clear again: Yes you can use WS-* to implement SOA, but SOA is not Web Services as an architecture.

Secondly, we all suffer from a natural tendency to wish the world to be simpler than it is and many of the WOA proponents seem to prone to this. I can see how WOA will be great for particular classes of solutions which are lighter weight and web-oriented. To quote Whit Andrews of Gartner back in 2005, when he first coined the acronym WOA:

"It [WOA] returns resiliency and simplicity to the kinds of projects that it benefits."

However, some problems are simply more complex, some problems have more exacting requirements, we have to live with legacy systems, and finally just because an approach works to solve one problem doesn’t mean it can solve all problems.

And thirdly, enterprise architecture is rarely about replacement (see also EDA versus SOA etc) – it is generally about evolution. SOA is unlikely to be replaced by WOA as they are at their hearts complementary (and solving different aspects of the general problem). Furthermore, SOA will actually enable the creation in the enterprise of a lot of the collaborative, light-weight applications that WOA focuses on. Therefore, I agree with worldwide SOA executive Walter Falk of IBM’s Global Technology Services when he says:

“It [SOA] can also form an important foundation for the next wave of SOA-based technologies from the Web 2.0 sphere. SOA has matured—it’s not the latest thing anymore. There’s software-as-a-service, mash-ups, social tools…how do you open it up?”

Ronan

P.s. I had to think long and hard before writing this piece. I had promised myself to stick to finance subjects with the new blog, but I just couldn't resist getting involved in this one.