Dion Hinchcliffe, one of the first people to coin the term WOA, contributes further to the debate with a discussion on whether WOA is actually not that far from what current SOA implementations are doing, or considering doing, anyway. As he says:
I'm not personally caught up on what we call this next generation of lightweight, Web-aligned SOA either, but WOA is the best name I've seen so far.In Dion's definition, WOA is more than trying to reconcile SOAP and REST based approaches. In fact WOA is not synonymous with REST.
WOA encompasses all the architectural issues that are drive by the design of the World-Wide Web, an architecture, I will point out that has continued to refine itself including the rise of open Web APIs), prepackaged service consumption mini-applications (aka widgets or gadgets in the Web world, the advent of JSON, browser-based mashups, the recent resurgence of the Semantic Web, and much more.He believes that a lot of the anti-WOA discussions are being driven by the SOA community being protectionist and afraid of something that could change the SOA business fundamentally.
I think there is actually little threat here; most of the top-down activities that SOA initiatives have been putting in place, such as governance and cross-functional business architecture alignment, are just as appropriate -- if not more so -- when it comes to making WOA successful.According to Dion, WOA is an architectural style that is complimentary to SOA and he's not alone. David Linthicum had this to say on the subject:
... enterprises are finding that the path of least resistance is in essence to build their SOAs on the Web, using Web resources, including content, internet delivered APIs, and Web services. Once there is success with WOA you'll see the same patterns emerging behind the firewall, or SOA. This is similar to the rise of intranet applications after the success of Internet/Web systems.If you look at traditional SOA today, Dion states that WOA offers a number of advantages, including improved service consumption models that "are less expensive and time consuming to use as well as unleashing the tremendous power of link architecture to drive information discovery, leverage, and analysis." It offers a lower barrier to entry than some other techniques for implementing SOA. As Roger Smith mentions:
A growing number of companies are finding that lower-visibility Web-oriented architecture (WOA) developments, spawned through grassroots movements, are a better route to the service-oriented architecture.Dion goes on to state that distributed SOA has been neglected, especially when compared to WOA which is inherently distributed and offers techniques such as syndication and "low-impedance Web services." Plus popular development infrastructures, such as JEE and .NET, are embracing WOA (or at least REST) through approaches such as JSR 311 and WCF. It is still unclear whether this is due to a failure of other SOA approaches (such as Web Services), or simply because rarely does one size fit all. However, it's not all a bed of roses for WOA. As Dion points out there are some fundamental differences in the way businesses could exploit WOA that will make it more difficult for them to adopt, at least initially, which include the inherent searchability of information on the Web (PR people have learned that the Google cache will get you every time) as well as the fact that the APIs are inherently open for partners to exploit directly making it easier to expose the right data securely and reliably:
The shift in control, the increase in openness, the different way of thinking about architecture, the countless security issues and governance concerns will likely prevent movement to WOA at a rapid pace for many businesses.But it is clear that Dion and others believe strongly that the future of SOA is WOA. Whether it will happen this year or two years from now, WOA is building momentum and existing SOA incumbents need to embrace it or get out of the way.