A Foundation for Web 2.0
New forms of communication and personalized services-collectively referred to as Web 2.0 – are enabling browser-based applications to mimic the rich user experience of the client/server era. Referring to a second generation of the Web that entails hosted services and communities such as social-networking sites, wikis, and folksonomies, web 2.0 points to changes in the ways developers and consumers use the Web as a platform.
“Web 2.0 represents a series of new ideas about how to make applications more interactive,” sys John R. Rymer, vice president and senior analyst at Forrester Research. “It includes new metaphors for communicating and collaborating that have become popular on the Web at large. There’s absolutely no reason we shouldn’t’
T use these techniques in our business application.”
These new services are compelling, but they can’t stand in isolation from the rest of the enterprise. “For an enterprise IT department, the issue is not only how to use Web 2.0 capabilities but how to integrate new development environments and scripting languages with traditional languages and databases,” sys Kenneth Bailey, principal product manager for Oracle Fusion Middleware.
SOA lays a foundation for Web 2.0 because Web services protocols allow us to more flexibly create interactions and conduct transactions over the internet, Forrestr’s Rymer says. “Services can be plugged into social networks, wikis, rich internet applications and other metaphors and presentation formats,” he says. “Without SOA, Web 2.0 isn’t very interesting because the systems are too brittle, too static, and thus they can’t evolve to use these new capabilities.”
Oracle’s Bailey sees a naturay synergy between Web 2.0 and SOA-enabled applications. “Oracle WebCenter uses SOA principles to create productive work environments that include Web 2.0 services such as instant messaging, wikis, and discussion forums as well as application that create or use Web services,” he says.
SOA – service-oriented architecture of Oracle. Source: Oracle Magazine