SoA and Web 2.0: Married or Fiancés?

Luciano Baresi

Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione - Politecnico di Milano
piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 32 – 20133 Milano (Italy)
baresi@elet.polimi.it
home page

Sandy Carter [1] introduces the term flex-pon-sive to identify the needs of modern companies to move to flexible and responsive IT infrastructures. We all agree on the need of IT infrastructures able to support the frequent changes and intrinsic dynamism of modern business processes, but we might also agree on the fact that Web services and Web 2.0 are the enabling technologies for this significant shift. Services, and not just Web services, provide the basis to release a flexible back-end where componentized business processes can easily be assembled, re-assembled, and tailored to the different needs. Similarly, Web 2.0, Ajax, and other proprietary client-side technologies are imposing a new way to conceive Web applications, which are much more interactive, responsive, and user-oriented. Mash-ups are imposing a simple, user-centered way to “integrate” disparate sources of information ---and thus different services--- according to user preferences and deployment contexts.
If services define the technological underpinnings for the back-end of a modern IT infrastructure, where the enterprise service bus plays a key role, Web 2.0 provides suitable means to implement rich Web-based GUIs. Unfortunately, the actual integration between these technologies (or groups of technologies) seems to be still in the first phases: ready for a promising wedding, but still fiancés.
There are many reasons for this. They have been evolving in parallel, based on similar assumptions with different viewpoints, but with only limited attempts to work on their actual integration. Services usually neglect user interfaces, and Web 2.0 under-estimates the need for robust and reliable business logic. In this context, the talk (a) classifies the key representatives behind these technologies, (b) analyses the synergies between the two technologies, (c) identifies possible scenarios for their integration, (d) discusses the difficulties that still hurdle the marriage, and (e) provides a coherent solution (roadmap) for their seamless and full integration. The talk ends by proposing some possible research directions to move from a satisfying engagement to a fruitful marriage.

[1] Sandy Carter, The New Language of Business – SOA and Web 2.0, IBM Press, 2007