Web 2.0 and the World-Wide SOA
posted Monday, 28 November 2005
One of the profound strengths of Web 2.0 is that it encourages open protocols and APIs to share information with everyone over services, instead of just web pages. This lets the raw information that users contribute to Web 2.0 applications be shared across the Web for second uses, remixing, filtering, and syndication. This has led to the rapidly growing phenomenon of mash-ups and dynamic supply chains of information that span the entire world. It's also fostering something I call the Global SOA, and this is something RSS and to a lesser extent, things like REST, are making happen with surprising speed. Important tweaks to the protocol standards, like Microsoft's SSE will help create this information ecosystem in full strength in the not very distant future. Read this irreverent but very good article by Kurt Cagle for a somewhat different yet similar view of SOA and Web 2.0.
I recently had an opportunity to give a luncheon address on the subject of Web 2.0: The Global SOA to SAIC here in the Washington, DC area at their Enterprise Content Exploitation Day on November 16th. John Furrier, of the Web 2.0 Workgroup was nice enough to syndicate it this morning on PodTech.net. In the speech, which I gave in my capacity as Chief Technology Officer of Sphere of Influence, I provide a non-technical overview of Web 2.0 and discuss some of the exciting things happening in the Web 2.0 community at both a grassroots and at an industry level. I also discuss how to use Web 2.0 for content exploitation, which was the theme of the day, and is something at which Web 2.0 has some terrific strengths. It's not the clearest recording but the ideas resonated very strongly with the audience and I was surprised at the strong positive feedback I received on the subject of Web 2.0 as the Global SOA in particular. We now have a bunch of opportunities to talk about this exciting topic in the near future and expect to hear more in this space as we continue to develop these ideas.
It has been amazing to see the convergence of these two extensively overlapping organizing principles in software development however. I think the Web 2.0 toolset in particular has a lot to offer state-of-the-art SOA development particularly in the radical decentralization, Data as the Next Intel Inside, and the harnessing collective intelligence pieces of Web 2.0. For Web 2.0's part, SOA principles offer discipline, practical architectural patterns, orchestration (BPEL) and more. We're seeing tremendous interest in this area with SOA practitioners in the DC area and I'll write more about this here as I'm able to.
Semi-Sidenote: Ryan Carson is hosting what looks like a bang-up new Web 2.0 conference, The Future of Web Apps, in London of all places, with the creators of Flickr, del.icio.us, and 37signals among others. He told me he wants to create excitement about Web 2.0 in Europe and to get the folks across the Atlantic (and indeed across the world) to start innovating and building exciting Web 2.0 applications. I mention it here in the Global SOA context since Ryan is giving one of the sessions on how to build enterprise apps quickly with next generation web techniques. And that's something that Web 2.0 provides the SOA world: some really great lightweight techniques for rapidly building high-value, truly scalable solutions, inside and outside the firewall.
Technorati: web 2.0, soalinks: del.icio.us
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