Well-known blogger and Web 2.0 proponent Dion Hinchliffe has put together a list of 11 "emerging ideas" for SOA architects in 2007. Dion believes there is a severe disconnect between the needs of quickly delivering applications on time on the one hand, and the goal of carefully designing valuable and reusable services on the other hand, and highlights the influences Web 2.0 technologies can have on SOA. In Dion's own words:
Steeped in formal standards, byzantine product stacks, and software engineering principles, these are strange ideas for SOA architects to accept, much less embrace. Then there is the matter of usefully applying these ideas to create a effective service-oriented architecture that can be easily consumed by internal and external customers, and indeed, is preferred to use instead of reinventing the wheel. For the truth is, if the services most of us are building now were so much better than letting development projects just build it themselves, they would be beating a path to the nearest internal SOA representative to save themselves the cost and time. And while that is happening in some cases, SOA adoption studies and anecdotal evidence tells us it's just not happening enough.
He then proposes eleven ideas SOA architects should be considering for 2007:
- Making services consumable in the browser.
- Considering syndication over "service-izing."
- Deeply embracing URI addressability.
- Using Ajax as the face of your SOA.
- Monetizing Your SOA.
- Enable users as service consumers.
- Virtualization, fast scaling, and on-demand architectures.
- Offering an SOA as visual services via widgets.
- Considering JSON as a service option.
- Encouraging and discovering emergent solutions.
- Leveraging the Global SOA.
These ideas are described in more detail in Dion's original blog post.