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Enter WOA

Loraine Lawson on itbusinessedge.com on October 9, 2009, points to the views of Dion Hinchcliffe, who she calls "one of the more significant voices in the Web 2.0 world." Hinchcliffe, she says, is arguably the first to expand upon the concept of Web-oriented architecture "in his much-referenced 2008 post, "What Is WOA? It's The Future of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)."

In his post, Hinchcliffe writes that SOA has failed, explaining that: "Unfortunately, despite two decades of experiments in heavyweight software engineering (the alphabet soup of EAI, SOA, ESB) for solving these types integration problems, we've seen relatively marginal improvements for most implementers despite heavy investments by businesses large and small."

Moreover, he says: "Even though Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiatives around the world have the right goals, most efforts have fallen profoundly short of our desired levels of integration and improved business agility."

The promising answer to SOA's shortcomings, says Hinchcliffe, is seen in the model of the World Wide Web. The Web model, he says "provides a single, open, and unified information architecture that is consistent, easily consumed, extremely scalable, securable, very reusable, resilient, and highly federated."

"Traditional SOA is facing a crises of identity at this point," says Hinchcliffe, "particularly given fairly lackluster results for most, and WOA may just be the prescription we need to make SOA deliver the robust outcomes that we were formerly expecting of it."

Unreachable Goal?

It may be that the goal of achieving a simpler, easier, cheaper, and flexible IT infrastructure will remain elusive. In a March 2007 whitepaper from Equifax entitled "Why Business Leaders Should Care About SOA," the authors wrote:

"Over the years, developers have tried a variety of approaches to make development projects less grandiose and expensive. However, in spite of a plethora of technologies, methodologies and standards, nothing has proved to be the silver bullet that reduces waste, inflexibility and complexity. Each new trend seems to solve one set of problems only to create a host of new ones. Now the buzz is service oriented architecture, or SOA. It promises to have staying power, experts say."

Now, however, it seems that SOA has joined the failure parade.

Is WOA or cloud computing the new answer? Time will tell...

Comments (1)

	1. 03-09-2010 16:43
	Well, I don’t my own blog or anything, but I am not sure if I agree with everything said here. SOA definitely did not have the impact that we hoped it would, nor did it ever live up to technological expectations that we had, but I am more of an optimist in that the efforts that took SOA-initiators (standard committees, products, etc) can be re-used by general cloud vendors. I have said this, and will say it again, cloud is not the be all and end all to all problems – but for cloud to actually “succeed”, it needs to learn from SOA’s mistakes. One of which: too many standards.   One last comment: one of the problems that cloud faces already is that we are not really sure what constitutes “success” for a cloud provider or a user. Registered

Art Sedighi

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