SOA and Web 2.0
Here’s a good article from e-week about Web 2.0 and SOA. It illustrates how “Web 2.0” principles are being used to reshape how companies are looking at the design of internal applications and services.
From the article, it talks about how H&R Block are re-designing a number of applications as web services.
Dan Cahoon was looking for a way to streamline staffing operations at tax company H&R Block, the nation’s largest seasonal employer. Rather than use traditional desktop-based software for the job, the senior systems architect at H&R Block was able to deliver SOA-connected AJAX portlets to more than 12,000 branch offices for temporary work spaces to meet the company’s staffing needs.
Cahoon’s example illustrates the growing trend of merging Web 2.0 technologies with SOA (service-oriented architecture) to address issues normally handled through PC-based software, resulting in faster, cheaper and more flexible solutions….
And the business people can start to build useful applications from other data feeds, ala popfly / yahoo pipes.
….This trend touches on RIAs (rich Internet applications), mashups, AJAX, RSS, REST (Representational State Transfer) and other Web 2.0 areas. Now being referred to as Enterprise 2.0, the Web 2.0 technologies are helping to create rich interactive front ends to SOA back-end systems. In addition, line-of-business users who typically are nondevelopers can take services and build mashups without IT involvement—a potential boon for productivity but also a possible problem without proper governance.
This also raises some important questions about SOA, webservices and a like. We’re going to need to figure out ways to evaluate the capabilities of the different services. As SOA are evolving very quickly, it will be really hard to pick the right services and frameworks to achieve the objectives.
Food for thought.