I first became interested in WOA after watching this QCon presentation by Dr. Jim Webber and Martin Fowler of ThoughtWorks fame. Since that initial exposure, I have continued to read web articles and blog posts in an effort to learn more about this approach.

WOA uses the same basic architecture concepts while replacing technologies like SOAP and ESBs with REST. In other words, take the architecture guidance from SOA, take out the complex, expensive proprietary technologies and replace them with open, standard, web-based technology like HTTP and POX. Instead of having a complicated ESB or EAI package sitting in the middle of your services directing traffic, you instead use standard HTTP verbs like GET, POST and friends to send messages to various services. It is so simple it is brilliant. The down side to this approach currently, is that there is little to no tools support out there today to assist developers with this approach. On the other hand, that also means that there are opportunities out there for somebody to put together some tooling around these concepts.

The more I learn about WOA, the more I am convinced that this is the future of integration. My next step will be to try and build a non-trivial demo system using this approach. I will try and post here about my experience.

A couple of good starter articles in addition to the video above include What Is WOA? It’s The Future of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Unboxing Web-Oriented Architecture: The 6 Aspects Of An Emergent Architectural Style from Dion Hinchcliffe’s Blog.

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