WOA versus SOA

My discussion point in my last entry discussed how SOA is agnostic in which technology should be used to employ it. Joe McKendrick and Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet along with research I did for a client identified a growing interest in using REST to support SOA. ZDNet refers to it as Web Oriented Architecture, a subset of SOA.

Dion Hinchcliffe's discussion on WOA

Some points that are referred to in these articles identify these characteristics:

- HTTP(S)
- POX
- JSON

Effectively from the runup of Web 2.0 technologies, the ever increasing amount of public APIs, and the increasing amount of mashups that are being performed, Web Resources are more available then Web Services. WOA is being identified as the necessary amount of complexity to get the job done.

If we compare WOA to SOA, there are some distinct differences with one distinct one being the Service or Resource Contract. WSDL/XSD/WS-Policy are front in center for describing a Web Service. Within REST, the contract is implicit and is based on HTTP verbs and XML Schema. If developing a web service, the contract analysis, design and development effort is the main focus whereby the service foundation layer and data representation layer are identified. In WOA, the data representation layer is the focus instead.