I recently had the opportunity to take part in a podcast with Dave Linthicum, noted speaker, author and entrepreneur in SOA and integration, about the rise of Web Oriented Architecture (WOA), and what it means to SOA. (Podcast link here.)

Dave and I talked about the rise of WOA, and we both agreed that WOA and SOA have more in common than they are different. Both seek to address business problems by evoking shared, standardized services from across the network.

As Dave put it: “I view them as one in the same… I never saw service oriented architecture being limited at the firewall.”  We can “abstract services that somebody else owns and host, which is even better, because you’re not paying a lot of money for those things, able to bind solutions within yoiur enterprise, and create solutions around the whole notion of SOA, and extend it out to the world via Web APIs.”

However, a lot of the action now seems to be taking place within WOA frameworks, Dave adds. “SOA is boring, takes forever …no one ever seems to move the ball too far forward in the world of SOA…. A lot of the service orchestration and successes in leveraging services.. in binding them to solutions seems to be occurring on the Web..  around the sopcial networking stuff, the platform as a service areas… ”

But still, WOA is service oriented architecture applied on a global scale: “If you look at the fundamental approaches and really what they’re trying to accomplish, they’re really both innate SOA and WOA,” Dave said.