Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA)

What is Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA)?

Web-Oriented Architecture is simple way to achieve what SOA have promised such as reusability, flexibility, and complexity reduction using appropriate incorporation of the existing Web 2.0 technologies like HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), REST (Representational State Transfer), and URI (Uniform Resource Identifier).

In a simpler way “Web Oriented Architectures came along the WEB 2.0 revolution to extend SOA”

What is Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)?

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a mechanism for achieving the interoperability between systems and for reusing the functionality at the business level. Advantages include Cost efficiency, agility, adaptability, and leverage of legacy investments, business flexibility by dividing processes as services at the fine-grained level.

SOA also can be considered as an IT strategy reorganizing enterprise applications into basic services which can be assembled, reused and collaborated so as to find a quick solution according to business demands.

SOA defines interactions among service requester, service provider, and service registry

• SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is a communication protocol to exchange information request/response messages between the servers and clients in the network.

• WSDL (Web Services Description Language) is an XML (eXtensible Markup language) technology describes the Web service and defines how SOAP and relevant messages are aggregated and exchanged.

• UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) is a standard to disclose and explore the Web service information. It is a key component which enables the development, setting, finding and calling of the Web service.

Service provider submits WSDL to the service registry while the service requester receives WSDL by via of UDDI from service registry. Then, the service requester calls the service using SOAP to connect to the service provider.

Any Negative affects using SOA?

• Realization costs

Web service alone are defined by over 70 distinct specifications, including SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) for a message format, UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, Integration) for a service discovery, WSDL (Web Service Description Language) for a service description and so on.

This Over-standardization makes SOA difficult and complex to realize.

Can WOA solve this Negative affect using SOA?

WOA use existing standards such as HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), REST (Representational State Transfer), and URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) without defining additional standards. These existing standards have been used successfully in the current Internet.
This potentially decreases the development cost and time for WOA when compared with SOA.

• In WOA, information is represented in the form of resource on the Internet, where every resource can be located via a globally unique address using URI.

• Resources are manipulated based on the protocol specified in the URI, typically HTTP, using the technique known as REST.

Conclusion:

WOA = SOA + WWW+ REST

Above equation is not that WOA is equivalent to these. WOA is what we get when these are combined together.

SOA is not necessarily about Web services at all, but is actually much more about service-orientation concepts like loose coupling and abstraction. Using multiple tools to achieve this is really costly when compared to WOA. This can be achieved with cloud computing.

It is not just that WOA is comparatively preferred over SOA; should choose which would best suit the situation for our business

What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is defined as using scalable computing resources provided as a service from outside our environment. We can access any of the resources that live in the “cloud” at any time and from anywhere across the Internet. Users need not have to care about how things are being maintained behind the scenes in the cloud.

Amazon: Real time Example of using cloud computing.

Amazon provides several Web services to fulfill some of the core needs of most systems: storage, computing, messaging, and datasets. These services are available to anyone who has access to the Internet. These webservices live in “cloud” outside our environment and are available. Users should pay based only on their usage, with no need for upfront expenditures and capital outlay. There are no maintenance costs for users because the hardware is maintained and serviced by Amazon.

IBM offers few Products for cloud computing

• WebSphere Cast Iron

• WebSphere DataPower Cast Iron Appliance XH40