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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« More on ESBs and 'Rats Nests' of Point-to-Point Services | Main | Survey: SOA isn't Just Surviving, It's Thriving » March 26, 2008Panel: Web 2.0 Will Shake Up SOA, Big Time Beth Gold-Bernstein, my colleague here at ebizQ, recently hosted an extremely compelling online panel discussion on the growing convergence between SOA and Web 2.0. Beth was joined by luminaries including Dion Hinchcliffe, whom I would consider the leading analyst in the Web 2.0 realm, ZapThink's Ron Schmelzer, and Doug Wilson, CTO of portals and collaboration products at IBM. (A full transcript is posted here.) The discussion was refreshingly straightforward. Doug Wilson even came out and said that SOA can be pretty "boring," as in "SOA is kind of a boring thing if the end user can't interact in some way with the service oriented architecture. If they can't avail themselves of the capabilities, and they can't drive the compositional nature of that." As explored in this blogsite, SOA has been delivering plenty of success stories. But how often is your latest SOA project the subject of chats at weekend parties? Conversely, there's been a stampede to Web 2.0. And, Web 2.0 probably is a subject brought up at parties. And people's eyes don't even glaze over. The question is, how can we capture just a piece of this enthusiasm and apply it to SOA? The fact of the matter is, as expressed by the panelists, Web 2.0 may ultimately be SOA's savior. Some experts say that the lightweight, user-friendly techniques seen in the Web 2.0 experience can serve as SOA's best selling tool. Some even say that eventually, the two worlds may even blend to the point where they are indistinguishable. Doug Wilson pointed out that "it's not always obvious for people to see the connection" between SOA and Web 2.0. However, at the end of the day, aspects of Web 2.0, such as mashups, "are the juxtaposition or combination of information from multiple back end services. In fact, mashups are a compositional mechanism by which an end user or programmer can bring multiple sources of information or transactions to bear on one problem. This goes right to the heart of SOA and SOA composition." Doug also stated that enabling users to easily compose services that make calls to back-end systems will go a long way to helping businesses see the value in SOA. Dion provided a good working definition of what Web 2.0 is all about: "Defining Web 2.0 can be a challenge because it represents a number of significant but very interrelated trends. The simple nontechnical definition is that it's 'Networked applications that leverage network effects.' What we're really talking about is software and communities that get smarter the more people participate in them." Dion also provided this example of how Web 2.0 sweeps through the enterprise: "AOL rolled out...a very heavyweight content management platform. But users gravitated to a new media wiki platform, the same platform that powers Wikipedia. Within a couple of months, because the tool was so much easier to use, and had been proven on a very large scale, with all the adoption kinks worked out of it in that very large laboratory called the Web... it was successful to the point where 95% of their content management now occurs in those platforms."This is a fairly common story, Dion added -- analogous to the way the PC came into the back door of organizations 20 years ago. For some, SOA may meld into Web 2.0, and the result will be a global SOA, with various islands comprised of enterprise SOAs. Dion Hinchcliffe put it this way: "Look at the Web as it is today -- it has now become the world's largest service oriented architecture. Over 600 companies have opened their business up as Web services." However, currently, the tools and protocols being used for Web 2.0 engagements are "not what we're using in the enterprise," Dion observed. "We're seeing this rise to Web oriented architecture that's happening outside our organization -- they're using REST instead of SOAP." Will Web 2.0-style approaches eventually permeate through enterprise walls? It's inevitable, Dion continued. Web 2.0 is "leading to a realignment in the way we look at SOA. When I talk to many SOA architects, they're trying to figure out where this fits in. We are seeing some differences and some changes to the way we might want to do things on the infrastructure side." Ron Schmelzer pointed out that it this point, they are separate efforts -- "companies are still trying to understand SOA and Web 2.0 on their own. However, he added, both business and IT are recognizing that enterprise systems, applications, and data need to be less stodgy. "When we go home and we're away from out offices, and we use the Net, and we use the latest experiences -- Google, YouTube, blogs -- we're experiencing the broad movement to Web 2.0 as part of our general computer using experience. And then we go back to our office... where we're faced mostly with technology that's still in the 90s." "There's a lot of desire, especially among the folks in IT, to Bridge the gap," he said. "The vector, the movement... is toward this more holistic, architectural loosely coupled user-empowered style of IT -- and away from a central architecture trying to fit everything into a set of homogeneous set of systems that are tough to integrate with." However, Ron pointed out that Web services and SOA are two very different things, meant to serve different purposes: "The concept of SOA actually predates Web services by at least five or six years. The main proponents of service oriented architecture at that time created architecture around CORBA. The use of Web services technology is only appropriate for certain circumstances; it's not appropriate for all uses of service oriented architecture. For example, I wouldn't want a mobile device sitting on a network consuming heavy Web service and protocols." Web 2.0 and SOA also have different philosophies, Ron added. "SOA is about empowering the enterprise, and Web 2.0 is about empowering the individual," he said. "The ideas of Web 20 and SOA are definitively different. They espouse different ideas. SOA is primarily architectural, which means it's an approach a methodology a style and a design. Web 2.0 is a broad-based movement that covers a variety of topics." In combination, however, Web 2.0 and SOA are a power to be reckoned with. "We want the user to become increasingly more familiar with in the broad Internet, and bring that experience into the enterprise," Ron said. "At the same time, allowing the enterprise to free up its assets, and empower the business user." The complete panel Webcast can be found here. A full transcript is posted
Posted by joemckendrick in
Enterprise 2.0
• SOA
• SOA Events
• Software as a Service
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