Web 2.0 vs. SOA…huh?!?

Oct 26, 2006 by Sinclair Schuller

Although the posts are old and the topic potentially stale, I recently read a few posts creating a Celebrity Death Match style arena for SOA and Web 2.0. Richard Monson-Haefel of the I, Analyst blog posted a comparison highlighting the similarities but describing SOA as missing the “social aspect”, Don Hinchcliffe has a good thorough treatise on trying to make sense of it all here, and Jason Kolb fired up most of this conversation here. John Hagel recognizes SOA and Web 2.0 as two complementary technologies separated by a cultural gap in an article he posted a few months ago.

Whew! After all of that, I have to throw my two cents in (as usual). While I agree with some of these, I’m going to venture off on a slight tangent and make a different suggestion. first, let me say I agree with the notion that establishing a “vs.” between the two seems quite trite. In my opinion, they are far from competitive. I also will not classify them as being analogous to each other.

So what’s the deal? First, let’s define Web 2.0 as an ideology and set of associated tools, data, and concepts whose goal is to incorporate end users into the “architecture” such that the architecture becomes a user-centric model. The primary goal in this model is to allow users to collaborate with each in ways that were previously not possible by allowing them to connect systems and data over the Internet in ad-hoc but powerful fashions. Holy mouthful! I DO NOT see Web 2.0 as RSS, or as REST, or as some other singular, self containing technology. Web 2.0 is much bigger.

Now SOA. SOA is a description of a beautiful systems architecture of loosely coupled components that focus’ on process while reducing dependency. (A much more thorough description can be found here). With this in mind, I’m not sure how the notion of one being “vs.” the other fits. Also, while describing them as complimentary seems much more accurate, I think it may over do it. I think SOA facilitates the implementation of the Web 2.0 ideology, and does so very well.  SOA defines an architectural abstraction that provides one of the many potential underlying implementations of a Web 2.0 participant. An application residing on a server could allow for web-based mashups, but be itself defined in an SOA manner. Remember, when I say SOA, I mean SOA the architecture, not SOAP or anything silly detail like that. The notion of SOA is simply loosely coupled services, which is one of the tenets of Web 2.0 that allow for the user-centrically (new word) motivated infrastructure that is the connectivity of data and systems we call Web 2.0. Software as a a service is something that is part of Web 2.0, whose constituent applications can be built using SOA. SOA seems to be a participant in the Web 2.0 ideology. Make sense? Hope so!