I guess I am suffering from *OA overload. Trying to understand landscapes which are still developing and where religious and partisan statements happen frequently can be hard. Or maybe it’s impossible. I am seeing too many *OAs these days. This is probably a subset of what’s around:

  • SOA: Service Oriented Architecture
  • EOA: Event Oriented Architecture (sometime also called EDA for Event Driven Architecture)
  • WOA: Web Oriented Architecture
  • ROA: Resource (or REST) Oriented Architecture
  • SynOA: Syndication Oriented Architecture

And of course all these *OAs are not independent. WOA = SOA + WWW + REST and similar equations can be found in a number of forums. Eveybody is fighting for his/her favorite *OA. Why not build a crawler that collects all these statements, then feeds them into Matlab, and symbolically computes the true *OA landscape?

Of course, IT is a huge market and as usual it’s all about branding and owning a brand and hopping on the right brandwagon, and it is not a mystery where all of this comes from. Sometimes I just think it would be so nice if all these *OAs were actually well-defined methodologies and we could spend less time trying to understand what the latest *OA is all about and if and how it actually introduces something new, and spend more time actually comparing these well-defined methodologies and their strengths and weaknesses.

My personal bet is on SynOA, one of the less popular *OAs. Atom (and more so AtomPub) needs a little overhaul to be less focused on time, the Atom landscape needs a couple more features such as feed query features, but then Web-style syndication is ready to become the main abstraction for information dissemination in loosely coupled systems. I have no idea how SynOA relates to ROA or WOA, but to me it looks like the right thing to do if you are thinking about Web-style cooperation, which of course is not the only possible scenario where *OAs are needed.

Anybody wants to submit his/her favorite *OA equation so that we can figure the *OA landscape out automatically?