The SOA and Web 2.0 Debate...
I had posted an older version of this write-up on another blog… Just consolidating all SOA related posts in one place… By the way, thanks to Infosys for providing me this platform.
And here I go…
In a recent conversation with my colleagues, this topic came up… there were two schools of thought – one arguing that SOA and Web 2.0 are one and the same and the other convinced that these two are completely different animals. Well in my opinion both opinions are correct… and wrong. Here is why I think so…
First let me establish my definition of SOA and Web 2.0. And then get into the debate of comparing these two concepts.
In simple language SOA is an architectural style that preaches making available enterprise information to interested parties, within and outside the enterprise, seamlessly and in real-time (a more detailed viewpoint is available here).
Web 2.0, on the other hand, is a concept that preaches seamless collaboration among end users through technology, while retaining rich user experience, without having to change the natural human behavior due to technology workarounds.
Let me also define couple of terms I am going to use in the subsequent paragraphs.
Rich Business Experience: IT systems of an enterprise can be termed as providing Rich Business Experience if they are closely aligned with business needs. In other words, the IT systems are extremely flexible and are capable of quickly adopting to changes, they cost less to maintain and enhance, all enterprise data is accessible in real-time aiding better decision making. All these leading to improved customer satisfaction thereby help business to grow.
Rich User Experience: An IT application can be termed as providing Rich User Experience if it is intuitive for the users and its behavior closely mimics natural human behavior.
As is evident, SOA is more attuned to addressing the needs of an enterprise. It focuses on providing rich business experience and not necessarily so much on providing rich user experience. SOA primarily talks about organizing and managing internal structure of the software and data in such a way that the rich business experience is not compromised despite of constantly changing business needs. On the other hand Web 2.0 focuses on providing rich user experience without bothering itself with the issues like manageability of the internal structure of the software.
So what is the relationship between SOA and Web 2.0? SOA and Web 2.0 are very closely linked to each other in some ways and are miles apart in some other ways.
The linkage: While SOA is primarily focused on improving business experience, it is true that business are run by human beings and hence improving user experience is an essential part of improving the overall business experience. Web 2.0 is very well positioned to extend the improvement in experience to the presentation layer by take advantage of flexibility of underlying software due to SOA.
SOA looks at improvements in experience from inside out (from software to human) while Web 2.0 looks at improvements from outside in (human to software)
The separation: Not all business applications need user interaction. In fact for core business applications, the less human intervention, the better (more automated business). Businesses are constantly on the look out for cutting costs... including data processing costs. And it costs a lot less to process data when it is done as close to the processor as possible (meaning without human intervention). This will probably remain true for a foreseeable future irrespective of how cheaper the processing power becomes, unless it becomes available absolutely free.
Although this number could be different for some businesses (such as e-businesses – eBay, Amazon), for most other businesses, more than 80% of IT applications form core business applications. Hence Web 2.0 probably has space for contribution in the remaining 20% applications only which are non-core in nature...
- Shireesh Jayashetty
Comments
Agree with web 2.0 as being of interest to more user interaction based applications. In that context, web 2.0 and soa interlinkage might be useful for this category of applications.
However, even for this web 2.0 based user interactive applications, it is to be noted that SOA and web 2.0 have interplays which cannot be ignored.
To illustrate one side of this story, SOA can provide standardization at the back end for these front end user facing web 2.0 applications. In that context reuse of similar functions across web 2.0 based rich internet applications by using SOA at back end is a good trend and must be advocated.
Likewise, web 2.0 based front end technologies can provide good potential areas of application involving portals (e.g. WSRP) and user facing applications where SOA is the backend by bringing in high levels of customization to possible ways of leveraging shared services from backend (e.g. web services). To illustrate, we can devise rich web 2.0 client based user interfaces to design business orchestrations of services, or provide rich interactive dashboards to monitor the life cycle of services in an SOA infrastructure.
Posted by: Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni | August 14, 2006 11:03 AM