Web 2.0 and SOA share many common aspects. Web 2.0 can be conceptualized as a global SOA that is hosting millions of services and thousands of composite applications today.
i-Technology Viewpoint: Is Web 2.0 the Global SOA?
— The subject of Web 2.0 has become profoundly important over the last year. Web 2.0 describes the next generation of the Web as an application platform where most of a user’s software experience resides. The subject is somewhat controversial, but it’s becoming ever more apparent as the successor to monolithic system architecture, prepackaged software, and traditional Web applications.
Moreover, many organizations that are currently implementing SOA will increasingly need to connect their Web-facing applications to their internal SOAs. In a sense, Web 2.0 is about the entire Web being a reusable, shareable, public SOA.
However, there are some marked differences between Web 2.0 and SOA. Web 2.0 emphasizes a social aspect that is missing from SOA. SOA has much more central configuration control and management, while Web 2.0 is freewheeling and decentralized. Web 2.0 also emphasizes rich presentation of data for end-users, while SOA does not itself deal with presentation.
Nevertheless, it is possible that Web 2.0 and SOA will eventually converge into an almost indistinguishable set of software development practices, since SOA and Web 2.0 both contribute much to the value proposition of the other. For example, companies such as eBay and Google are already combining SOA and Web 2.0 for competitive advantage.
Web services, the most common implementation of SOA, make it easy to build custom applications to buy and sell goods on eBay, or to harvest eBay’s listings for market research. At the same time, eBay is full of Web 2.0 features such as linking users to potential buyers or sellers according to revealed interests, and collecting feedback in order to build a trust and peer-rating system. In typical Web 2.0 fashion, web services from eBay, Google (such as Search or Maps) and other vendors are often combined to create mash-ups which are analogous to composite services in SOA.
As organizations increasingly search for innovative applications and services to improve their business processes and to enrich the work environments of their knowledge workers, both SOA and Web 2.0 will be fundamental to the roll-out of collaborative business applications in the enterprise as monolithic technologies do not cater well to the emerging ways of distributed, flexible and mobile teamwork.
