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WOA: The future of SOA?
First generation Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) services were built around technologies like SOAP and sophisticated WS-* specifications. But SOA has had a problem of bootstrapping itself into the mainstream and much of the delay in its uptake has been around its complexity. The alternative? Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) — technology popularized on the Web that is challenging standard thinking around SOA.
Traditional SOA has had great successes, but the positives are not universal. An InformationWeek survey in 2007 found that 32 percent of
SOA projects didn’t live up to expectations. Only 10 percent said that their experience with SOAP exceeded their expectations. And of those who were disappointed, 58 percent said it introduced needless complexity while 30 percent said that it cost more than they expected.
Roger Smith at InformationWeek explains: “A growing number of companies are finding that lower-visibility Web-oriented architecture (WOA) developments, spawned through grassroots movements, are a better route to the service-oriented architecture. WOA, like SOA, is an architectural approach to system design, though WOA is resource-oriented rather than service-oriented. What’s the difference? While the core SOA design unit is a reusable service that fulfills a distinct business function, resource-oriented services are more limited and data-focused.”
WOA is based around the Universal Resource Identifier, the URI, and combines simple well-understood Web operators like GET, PUT, POST and DELETE using a method called Representational State Transfer (or REST).
WOA is easier to understand and implement, scales better and has seen more widespread adoption. Vendors like Amazon have offered REST versus SOAP interfaces to find that developers overwhelmingly preferred REST. Web Development language Ruby on Rails has deprecated SOAP in favor of their REST interface. And Alfresco choose REST over SOAP for their web-glue framework called Surf.
