Web Oriented Architecture

After a hard day's work at Broadsight Towers, some of the team decided to let our hair down last might by attending a lecture on Web Oriented Architectures at the Institute for Engineering and Technology (IET) in London. It was given by Mark Edgington. Here’s our quick précis, with apologies to Mark!....

The basic premise was that Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a heavyweight architecture that is required for enterprise solutions whereas web oriented architecture (WOA) is a lighter weight solution that covers most of the use cases. Although web based architecture is not a formal specification, there is a significant amount of custom and practice. Because of this popularity and also because it’s a simple architecture, it has good inter-operability. Think of all the bots and clients talking to Twitter!

SOA is appropriate for applications that need security, transactional integrity and all those good enterprise grade things. They tend to be internal to an organization and this is just as well, because components from different vendors are often not interoperable.

Don't be religious! The SOA and WOA approaches both have pros and cons. Choose the one that is fit for your purpose. This might mean using both approaches on the same project for different users or purposes

It seems to us that many complex standards emerge, then after a while the community realize that they can get 80% of the benefit from 20% of the complexity and invent a cut down standard for "everyday" use – X.500 and LDAP, X.400 and SMTP, ATM and TCP/IP.

Our only quibble with the lecture was that SOA was presented as synonymous with the SOAP/WDSL family of standards and WOA with REST. We find that the usage tends to refer to the business and technical model at an abstract level.

The IET are running another series next year, starting in September 2009. Have a look at IET Events if you are in London.”