*You can read the following article by Mark Little at:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/11/woa-phony*
*
Gervas*
<<Over the past year or so we've seen more and more discussion and
debate around WOA. Does it bring anything new to the debate over, say,
REST? <http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/whoa-woa> Is it different to
SOA? <http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/09/woa-soa-debate> In fact should
SOA adopt WOA? <http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/09/soa-woa> What about
WOA governance? <http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/08/woa-governance>
Through all of the confusion and murkiness around the term, one thing is
clear: this could be yet another battle on the scale of REST versus WS-*
<http://www.infoq.com/articles/sanjiva-rest-myths>, or VHS versus
Betamax
<http://www.mediacollege.com/video/format/compare/betamax-vhs.html>.
Recently Judith Hurwitz <http://www.hurwitz.com/> entered the fray with
her article Why I think Web Oriented Architecture is Phony
<http://jshurwitz.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/why-i-think-web-oriented-architecture-is-phony/>.
As she says in the article:
So, from what I can see the positioning is that SOA is about back
end services and protocols like SOAP, etc. and WOA is about cool web
protocols like REST, etc. So, perhaps we are supposed to say, thank
goodness that we can move away from SOA and find something new and
exciting to focus on.
She disagrees that SOA is about back-end protocols and services. In fact ...
Protocols like REST that provide stateless communication are, in
fact, an integral part of a service oriented architecture.
Obviously REST is an architecture
<http://www.infoq.com/articles/rest-introduction> and not a 'protocol',
but we can ignore that for the purposes of this discussion. (Mark Baker
<http://www.markbaker.ca/blog/about/> points this out as well on the
comment section to Judith's article). She goes on to say that the power
of SOA is the fact that business can focus on creating the services that
are key to their business functions as well as enabling those services
to be used flexibly to create a plethora of agile business processes.
Companies are getting pretty creative with this approach. Not only
are they creating business services involving software components,
but they are tying those business services into business elements
such as monitoring electric meters. [...] These customers don't care
if you call this approach SOA, WOA, or CASH...they simply know that
it is allowing them the flexibility they never had before.The bottom
line is that we simply don't need another new acronym. SOA is not a
fad, it is a long term business approach to turning IT and business
assets into services that can be used as part of an evolving
business process.
It does seem that Judith is missing what people like Dion Hinchcliffe
<http://hinchcliffe.org/default.aspx> are saying about WOA and SOA
<http://hinchcliffe.org/archive/2008/09/08/16676.aspx>:
WOA is a really a sub-style of SOA that is actually highly
complimentary. I personally believe we've collectively discovered
that we've been spending the last few years on a course that just
needs a healthy and appropriate re-adjustment, with the concepts in
WOA helping us find a better way.
However, to conclude Judith has created an online poll to try to give a
voice to the non-vocal majority and determine whether people believe 'Do
you think we need something called Web Oriented Architecture?'
<http://jshurwitz.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/why-i-think-web-oriented-architecture-is-phony/>
As of the time of writing this article only 33% of voters thought the
term WOA was needed. It doesn't say how many people have voted, so it's
not really possible to determine how emphatic an opinion this is.
However, Gartner analyst Nick Gall <http://blogs.gartner.com/nick_gall/>
comments:
Hey, as of ~just past midnight 10/22, a third of the respondents
think WOA is the wave of the future! I think that's an amazingly
high percentage. Rock on!
Not content with just one poll though, Nick has created his own 'Do you
agree with Judith Hurwitz that WOA is phony?'
<http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1024755/>, which at this moment has
56% of people agreeing with Judith. Fortunately this poll gives the
number of votes cast
<http://answers.polldaddy.com/viewPoll.aspx?view=results&id=1024755&msg=voted>,
which in this case is 9 so hardly a good statistical distribution to
draw any analysis (without going into the fact that these 9 votes could
be all from the same person!) So where does this leave us? Well if more
people took the time to cast their vote (one vote per person please) we
may be able to draw some conclusions from these polls. Without that the
waters are still a little murky as far as WOA is concerned.>>
