WOA! SOA meets Web 2.0
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By David S. Linthicum
May 15, 2008 —
Not sure if you’ve been paying attention, but there is a new term that’s being tossed about these days. It’s called Web Oriented Architecture or WOA. You can think of WOA as SOA meets the Web 2.0, but perhaps it's not that simple. WOA may indeed lead to SOA and evolve differently, albeit using the same patterns. Let's get into this a bit.
As most of you know, the process of dragging SOA and the Web together has been a crusade of mine for some time now. It appears that this is occurring at a much faster pace than anticipated. Indeed, if you look at the most successful SOA deployments, most occur on the Web, not within the enterprise. It does not matter to me if you call this “The Global SOA,”, “Web 2.0” or “WOA,” as long as the core value is understood.
So, if WOA is the bomb, where is SOA? I thought that Dana Gardner put it best in a recent blog post:
“The uptake of general-purpose service enablement is by no means a hockey stick trend line. The adoption patterns some five years into the SOA evolutionary path do not show a ‘slam dunk’ demand effect. The role, impact and importance of SOA are, in fact, ambiguous … still. Many see it as merely an offshoot of EAI rather than a full-blown paradigm shift.”
The ugly truth behind SOA, as we've discussed here a few times, is that it's a slow evolution, not a revolution. It's complex, expensive, but typically worth it if you hang in there. However, hanging in there is something that U.S. companies don't do well. Tactical issues often trump strategic projects, thus SOA is slow on the uptake. So, Dana is correct: SOA is slow, WOA is fast. But maybe they are solving the same problems.
I really don’t care if you do SOA on the Web, within the firewall or both. Indeed, the emerging Web demonstrates more of a hockey stick adoption pattern and is worth a look in the context of SOA. The world of Web 2.0 is innovating and experimenting at break-neck speed with social media, social networking, Ruby on Rails, SaaS, Python, REST and a mix of rich Internet application approaches, including AJAX.
Not sure this is anything new, as you know. Clearly, I made similar assertions, publishing several articles and speaking at several conferences about the synergy between the emerging Web and SOA. Others were doing the same thing, but SOA was so confusing unto itself, I’m not sure that the message got through to the masses.
Basically, I said that what is important to remember is that there is a huge resource being created on the Web these days. This includes access to SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com that are better than their enterprise-bound counterparts, service marketplaces such as StrikeIron, and even mashable applications that you can mix and match with other Web 2.0 applications or enterprise applications to solve business problems quickly.
What is changing quickly is that enterprises are finding that the path of least resistance is, in essence, to build their SOAs on the Web using Web resources, including content, Internet-delivered APIs and Web services. Once there is success with WOA, you'll see the same patterns emerging behind the firewall, or SOA. This is similar to the rise of intranet applications after the success of Internet/Web systems.
The general notion is that the Web provides another location for core business processes using outsourced infrastructure and reusable business processes accessible on-demand. These Web-born systems/architectures provide better development speed, access to prebuilt resources and much more value when compared to traditional enterprise approaches. This is why SOA is proving itself on the platform of the Web more so than within the enterprise these days: It's just faster, easier and provides more initial ROI.
Keep in mind that enterprise SOA projects are still progressing. However, the use of Web-born resources, such as on-demand Web services, SaaS, and on-demand tools such as Google's new App Engine, is creating more of a grassroots movement toward SOA/WOA. This movement is moving from the developers to the architects, not from the architects to the developers. The former is much faster.
The same pattern was seen with the rise of SaaS. Salesforce.com did not sell to IT. IT would block any attempt to leverage remotely hosted applications. Instead, they sold to those who were in pain and needed a quick and easy solution, and SaaS filled that need nicely.
IT only adopted SaaS after there were so many SaaS users within their enterprise that they wanted to subsume and control the use of SaaS. I've personally seen IT leaders push back hard on SaaS, then change their tune once they've seen the value, or are forced to see it. There is always a not-invented-here issue with this technology, and clearly you can no longer hug your server. Those who were in denial are now coming around.
Web-born SOA, or WOA, is finding a similar adoption pattern. Composite applications will be and are being built within emerging on-demand tools such as Google App Engine. Those applications will need information, services and APIs, also delivered on-demand over the Web. Moreover, enterprises will seek to externalize existing enterprise data to WOA as well, thus user management and security will remain a core issue. Indeed, we could see many enterprises with the majority of business processes running outside of the firewall within just a few years.
Once that trend is clear, as it's becoming today, we'll find that more sophisticated core architectural technology will become more mature on the Web as well. This includes SOA governance on demand, service directories inclusive of visual and non-visual services available for mashing up into solutions. In essence, process by process, application by application and service by service, we're re-hosting core business processes and services on the Web.
While this was science fiction just a few years ago, it's happening today, guys.
David S. Linthicum is a managing partner at ZapThink. Reach him at david@zapthink.com.
Related Search Term(s): SOA & SaaS
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