While not many in the enterprise IT community are in favor of having yet another new acronym surface, there appears to be a quite a bit of debate revolving Web Oriented Architecture (WOA). Following the sluggish adoption of SOA in enterprises, WOA has come into focus and is regarded as a lighter version of SOA with some technology differences. While SOA is middleware-driven, investment heavy and typically involves integrating several back-end systems, WOA is about being light-weight and originating standards-based services internally and externally that can be immediately consumed. WOA is not really an architecture but a style of integrating several applications, using mashups and open APIs, REST and RIA clients from a variety of sources. REST is a popular, powerful and simple method of leveraging HTTP as a Web service. Information is represented in the form of resources on the network and is accessed and manipulated via a specified protocol. It will make sure that enterprises fall back on simpler and more straightforward methods that simply work. WOA is a promising bet for enterprises. It is about building new applications of code, not components, with the interactions all loosely coupled from start to finish. It’s about integration and leveraging existing assets and providing better control and access to enterprise application-specific data immediately, not after an internal SOA infrastructure is in place. Enterprises have started adopting WOA and in a variety of ways: these services can come together as portals, standalone Web apps, SaaS, or RIA front ends to support extended enterprise processes. Having said all this, WOA is not the solution to every problem.
There are some higher end applications where only SOA stacks can
come to the rescue. However, it surely is a robust, scalable and
reliable technology to build open and powerful web services. |
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