Web Oriented Architecture

I recently had the pleasure of watching Nick Gall give his take on something he describes as Web-Oriented Architecture or WOA.  There are a lot of ways to view Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and this particular lightweight version of SOA is well worth watching.  This is because WOA is more of an emerging best practice from the battle-hardened folks building software on the Web than it is from ivory tower architects or the analyst group notebook. This always lends an idea more credence in my book

Essentially, WOA describes a core set of Web protocols like HTTP and plain XML as the most dynamic, scalable, and interoperable Web service approach.  The only real difference between traditional SOA and the concept of WOA is that WOA advocates REST, an increasingly popular, powerful, and simple method of leveraging HTTP as a Web service in its own right (and carefully devised by the co-creator of HTTP, Roy Fielding.)

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