What Possibilities does Web 2.0 Offer for SOA Projects?

Submitted by Ivo Totev. Business Analysts

The way we use the Internet is in a state of transition. Now more than ever people employ the Internet to share ideas and collaborate on projects and content. The term " Web 2.0" refers to an evolving Internet, reflected today by wikis, weblogs and video portals. Service Oriented Architectures (SOA's), on the other hand, support business processes.

First-generation SOA projects were primarily dependent on middleware, and end user integration was a notion still in its infancy. Now SOA is moving closer and closer to the user -with a strong emphasis on rich semantic content, ergonomics, usability and availability via a browser. It is, after all, the users who should benefit the most in their daily work from the processes and services offered by SOA. Particularly in an enterprise context, a Web 2.0 approach enables better user interface information integration, even on a semantic level, going significantly further than was ever the case with the Internet.

It is essential to SOA project success, for example, to establish the "popularity" of certain business services, a.k.a. the frequency of use. Identifying user patterns such as, "When a user invokes Service A, he or she will usually need Service B too," help to further optimize SOA-based applications. These types of patterns can be easily tracked with Web 2.0 methods, allowing application optimization from a service point of view.

But how realistic is the vision of Web 2.0-based enterprise "mash-ups"? ("Mash-ups" are enterprise applications composed of internal and external services.) Portal-based Intranet applications give us a preview of what this vision means, integrating, for example, weather or geographical information. Web 2.0-based enterprise mash-ups go a step further though, bringing the idea of service orientation right to the user interface. Different applications are no longer viewed in individual frames side-by-side, rather front and back end services are logically linked. This landscape allows the respective business units to write and enhance these applications without significant IT intervention.

To get the full benefit from enterprise mash-ups, organizations need good governance and design processes. As with SOA, mash-ups also need a central registry of all user interface components and services, as this is the only way an organization can keep track of existing dependencies, non-functional properties and service level agreements.

User-friendly enterprise mash-ups within a SOA need specific approaches, such as AJAX, for creating robust user interfaces. These technologies are employed frequently in Web 2.0 solutions and are essential for organizations seeking to enter an interactive and collaborative dialog with users. In these ways, Web 2.0 combined with SOA offers businesses a wealth of new opportunities.