Joe McKendrick, ebizQ's SOA in Action Blogger, is a nationally published author and consultant
with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in
the technology industry. He is a contributing editor to a number of
national and international publications and Websites including
Database Trends & Applications, ZDNet, and Webservices.Org. He also
serves as analyst for Evans Data Corp., and is lead analyst for Evans'
Web services and enterprise development management issues surveys.
SOA in Action Blog
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« Fight SAA (Service Averse Architecture) with Lifestyle Changes | Main | SOA Has Many Owners; Needs to be Collectively Managed » May 22, 2007Are Mashups the New Face of SOA? Are mashups the new face of SOA? SOA and Web 2.0 may have a lot more common ground than first realized. Recently, I had the opportunity to work with Gian Trotta, Beth Gold-Bernstein, Elizabeth Book, and the ebizQ team to prepare collateral material to go with InfoWorld's recent SOA Executive Forum. Our special report on SOA and mashups for InfoWorld can be found here. As part of this effort, I had the opportunity to speak with some industry leaders about the converging roles of SOA and Web 2.0. Mighael Botha, technology evangelist at Software AG, for one, sees “mashups as being the face of SOA,” he said. “Mashups are something that I can take to a user, and say, ‘Okay, this is a mash-up that shows a single view of a customer within your organization.’ The user might not understand what a mashup is, but when they see that they can get all kinds of data about their customers or products from five or six or seven different systems in the back end.” Web 2.0 may ultimately even be good for SOA. Ashish Mohindaroo, senior director of Oracle Fusion Middleware, observed that “Web 2.0 is all about increased user productivity, and SOA is increased reuse of existing assets. If I'm able to mix and mash different Web site content, to deliver a new page or a new service to my end user, that's a great thing,” he explains. “I can assemble new services which in the past would have taken me a longer time because everything had to be built from scratch.” SOA and Web 2.0 have different constituencies, at least for now -- SOA tends to involve enterprise architects and development shops, while Web 2.0 has more of a consumerist element. Beth Gold-Bernstein also observes that there may be a generation gap at play with Web 2.0. Namely, that its now part of life for the under-40 crowd. This is bound to inevitably percolate into corporate management. And, there is more Web 2.0 being adopted within enterprises as of late. A recent survey of 2,847 executives worldwide by McKinsey & Company finds that investment in or planned adoption in the following Web 2.0 technologies and approaches: social networking (37%), RSS (35%), podcasts (35%), wikis (33%), blogs (32%), and mashups (21%). My colleague over at ZDNet, Dion Hinchliffe, observes that SOA and Web 2.0 have different centers of gravity, however. Dion has been watching the mashup developing between SOA and Web 2.0 for some time, and observes in a new post that both categories share a lot of overlap, as both invoke standards-based services that can reside anywhere across the Web."We’re continuing to see more clearly that Web 2.0 and SOA really are largely (but not 100%) the same concepts that merely lay on different — if fairly different — parts of the software continuum." The major difference, Dion observes, us that Web 2.0 focuses on the data as the most important part of software applications, while SOA focuses on the services and messaging. Many industry leaders now agree that enterprises need both the structure of an SOA-type approach and the entrepreneurial energy of a Web 2.0 approach. As part of the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum project, I spoke with Miko Matsumura, vice president of product marketing SOA for webMethods, who cautioned against letting mashups run too far amok without governance, as “there is almost a tyranny to structurelessness,” he says. “That kind of model is inherently less agile, flexible, and more expensive, than a model that actually consists of logical constraints.” Miko added that the constraints SOA governance may impose "should be thought of more as a ‘pivot’ than as a ‘straightjacket.’ If you constrain something along one dimension, it doesn’t mean that it’s not free to move across the other dimension. That’s the balance that SOA represents, which is the IT-business alignment. One side wants to go wild, while the other side wants to buckle down everything.” Both SOA and Web 2.0 have much to offer organizations going forward. Web 2.0 may have the wild, untamed energy of restless youth, but SOA brings the experience and maturity to keep efforts focused. Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry:
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