Enterprise 2.0 as a Front End for SOA
by Joe McKendrick
Can SOA and Web 2.0 co-exist? Better than that — they can finish each other’s sentences, so to speak.
Enterprise and Web 2.0 technologies — AJAX, mashups, and the like — can serve as rapidly deployable and highly flexible front-ends to back-end SOA. Desktop-installed software increasingly is being displaced through the use of AJAX and services.
eWeek’s Darryl Taft brought the worlds of SOA and Web 2.0 together in a recent article, noting how service firms are connecting the dots between front-end flexibility and back-end scalability.
For example, H&R Block — which uses a lot of seasonal workers, especially in the weeks leading up to April 15th — deployed SOA-connected AJAX portlets to more than 12,000 branch offices for temporary work spaces to meet the company’s staffing needs. The company employed AJAX instead of traditional desktop applications.
The Sports Club/LA is using both Web 2.0 technologies and SOA to support interaction with its 30,000 customers. The club’s Web site communicated data to the company’s Salesforce.com CRM system via Web services called through AJAX interfaces.
Dan Hushon, chief technology officer at EMC’s Grid Business Unit, speculates in the article that Web 2.0 concepts and technologies may, over time, “displace the WS-* stack in
many cases.”
Hushon said that lately, he’s seeing more JSON [JavaScript Object Access Protocol]/REST-based APIs to services than SOAP and JSON/REST. “And, in fact, REST, with its more data-centric approach, may very well prove to be better aligned with the need for collaborating around data. However, systemic security remains an Achilles’ heel for REST,” he said.
