On Nov 25, 2006, at 8:08 AM, Sanjiva Weerawarana wrote:
Wait, how do you advocate REST as an implementation technology for *service* oriented architecture when REST doesn't have the concept of services but rather has the concept of resources?
Too bad we have no agreed upon definition of SOA, but I thought we had clarified this before. You wrote:
> Really you should be talking about Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA).
To which I replied: > I agree, provided we're talking about SOA, the technology/ > architecture, not SOA, the business concept (as used e.g. by Steve > Jones). And your reply was: >+1.So, we agree that SOA (as supported by WS-*) and ROA (as supported by RESTful HTTP) are different *technical* concepts. We could call this SOA view "technical SOA".
Alternatively, we can also define SOA as a high-level business architecture, let's call this view "business SOA". "Business SOA" is a strategy that aligns IT capabilities and *business* offerings, enables agility in the enterprise, allows for new business models, improves transparency of costs etc. (To me, that's "the Steve Jones view"). This is valid, as well, and from this perspective, "technical SOA" and ROA are both valid implementation concepts.
I don't like this terminology; it would be far easier if we had clearly different terms. The fact that some view SOA as a technical architecture while others are convinced it has nothing to with technology or IT at all makes these discussions pretty hard. Don't blame me for this confusion :-) No-one from this list has managed to come up with a definition of SOA yet that we can all agree with.
Stefan -- Stefan Tilkov, http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/
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