If you do a superficial comparison at least, Web 2.0 is all about autonomous, distributed services, remixability, and is fraught with ownership and boundary/control issues.
And yet, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is all about, you guessed it, autonomous, distributed services, composite functionality, and is fraught with ownership and boundary/control issues.
This defintion is from 3 years ago (an eon in web terms), but still holds true. Although the enthusiasm, demonstrated by the surge of budding web designers in the late 90’s to the recent web 2.0 trend, has inadvertently created an architectural framework that also interests businesses, it is generally only the larger companies that adopt this model (or attempt to). The main reason is cost, as there has to be a lot of faith from accounts that this long term approach is based on a sound future-proof business case. As a corporation is not given to sharing, collabrating with competitors (something web start-ups know is essential), they have to start from the beginning, and just hope they have the right group of people to analyse, arhcitect, build and maintain a SOA framework. A tall order, given the many business drivers within coporations.
A lot of of the evolution of he web is down to web users doing something for the love of it, rather than immediate monetory gain. Cost is time, research and passion for the subject. In the article from Dion Hinchliffes blog, he argued that SOA was a mini-me version of web 2.0. A little generalised, due to the organic growth of the web, rather than the structured approach to SOA. Web 2.0 was about users being able to contribute, via enabling services such as Digg, Youtube, Delicious, etc .. Basic reporting, bookmarking, sharing evolves into more complex tools, the pulled in and distributed data as/when the user chose to do so. So rose MySpace, Facebook. Better communications tools surfaced, with Twitter to most used and well-known.
This wasnt the result of a corporate business plans, this was individuals acting on inspiration, and others following, and sometimes bulding applications that integrated … and so the chain goes on. Peer review is a powerful contribution to the evolvement of a website service, and user generated content is no longer an ardous task, many tools exist to make that easier. For business, SOA will still be an expensive investment, unless some way is found on how to let the process grown in an evolving fashion, rather than a flexible but contrained structured way.
