Aehso’s Output

ROA is a subset of SOA - but is WOA a superset of ROA?

I previously criticized a post by Dion Hinchliffe’s on WOA/Client but to be fair to Dion I have to compliment him on his latest post about the SOA world beginning to consider the Web-Oriented Architecture(WOA) in earnest.

Dion has continued to do some very deep thinking and about *OAs and this post reflects this effort - it should be immensely useful for anyone looking at how to evolve existing SOA systems over to a resource oriented architecture. I’m well past the ROA vs SOA debate (a ROA is a subset of SOA) but one lingering concern that I have about this and other discussions is this distinction between ROAs & WOAs.

I’m not quite sure that I can see a clear distinction between the two and I think having two TLAs for what may be the same underlying architecture type may be hindering understanding. Almost every core feature of WOA systems is derived from the underlying RESTful constraints. I’d imagine that if we could do away with one of these TLAs then the underlying concepts, and the differences from big-SOA, will become more accessible to all. (Note: I accept that there are non-RESTful anomalies out there mixed onto the www substrate but these edges always seem to fall by the wayside as the www has evolved.)

When I get chance I’ll try write up something more detailed on this but in the meantime if you have some clear examples of use cases where a WOA is a distinct superset of ROA then I’m sure they’d help my thinking.

Tags: roa, soa, woa