Mashups: The Evolution of the SOA

This article is first in a three-part series, providing a general
overview of the characteristics and technologies related to the term
Web 2.0 so that a platform can be laid for a detailed discussion about
how they relate to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) development.
The second part in the series examines the current state of IT and SOA
in the enterprise and discusses what situational applications and a
mashup ecosystem can offer. The third part describes the IBM Mashup
Starter Kit (IBMMSK) and how you can use it to develop situational
applications. Web 2.0 is best described as a core set of patterns that
are observable in applications that share the Web 2.0 label. These
patterns are services, simplicity, and community. This shift to a
service-based model has implications for how Web 2.0 applications are
now developed. The Web infrastructure is now seen as the bottom of the
application development stack.The prevalence of Web APIs lets you avoid
the work of creating certain features, thereby reducing your workload
so you can build applications faster. In addition, you can integrate
two or more of these Web APIs to create something new and unique, known
as a mashup. Web-based APIs can then be invoked using technologies,
such as Ajax, which provides a means for the browser client to
communicate with the server via JavaScript (both synchronously and
asynchronously). This means the application doesn't require the entire
page to be reloaded every time the client needs to communicate with
the server. You can use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) to serialize
and deserialize objects so that they can be sent between the browser
client and the server via Ajax. It's now quite common to see existing
services provide SOAP, Ajax, and REST interfaces. RSS and Atom feeds
have now gone beyond being used only to subscribe to blogs and news
feeds, and are seen as potential approaches to simplify specific
content-centric application architectures. The Atom specification is
a more recent evolution of the ideas originally embodied by RSS and
provides useful features, such as the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP),
which lets you publish information to be added to a feed. If event-driven
architectures are now part of the SOA framework, then feeds can be
considered part of the service paradigm and should be leveraged as such. More Information