From SOA to WOA

It's quite interesting to see how Internet age coming to the end. With HTML5 stake major players like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Adobe are creating a complete new direction on the web. Web sites are no longer just a set of pages served from the server.

The modern browser, or as they often called single-page applications are now full blown 'fat' application clients. And they have a full-blown application runtime (just like JRE or CLI). Just a short look on W3C (and not W3C) standards (see presentation below) will give you a good overview of the APIs similar to JRE APIs or Win32 APIs.

But the question which is more intersing for me now what will happen with larger application architecture. And in my opinion we shall move from 'old' Service Oriented Architecture to next generation of it: Web Oriented Architecture.

WOA does not mean a web in terms of the web-site or a Web Service (let alone the term 'Web Service' is too overloaded). The WOA for me is a application architecture for next generation of applications. Applications that are running in new runtime environment (Desktop or Mobile browser).

Such application would need a similar set of infrastructure services, just like SOA applications right now. Think about security, location, versioning, etc. Just like in SOA there will be a need for service bus, that will take care about service orchestration and data/message transformation. Such service bus should enable 'new applications' to consume a set of services. It could solve problems specific to new generation of applications, such as Single-Origin-Policy or enable faster application distribution via CDN. There are many other possible application for such a new service bus, however it's topic for the separate post.