Steve wrote a fantastic article on Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) that was just published At DotNet Developer’s Journal. It starts like this:
WOA, or “web-oriented architecture,” has proven itself as a viable approach to building large-scale, worldwide web services. This article introduces the principles behind WOA, how it is applied, and why it should be used even inside the enterprise.
And ends like this:
We have covered a lot of ground in this article. We defined WOA and REST in broad strokes. Then we put theory to practice and explored how WOA would be applied to an image processing application.
The examples illustrated the benefits of using established representations, such as Atom entries and feeds. The conventions defined by the Atom protocol gave us a well-defined processing methodology. If other processes within our enterprise are modeled using Atom, we will automatically have an intuitive understanding of them. This understanding scales outside of the walls of the enterprise to online web services as well.
We also saw how easy it is to work directly with HTTP, XML, and XPath using a WOA-friendly .NET library, such as MindTouch Dream. Using nothing more than raw HTTP request and response for documentation, we were able to translate resource interactions into running code that required just a few lines. In short, we were able to write our agent code close to the metal and it remained simple.
If you’re technical I encourage you to read in between.
Aaron Fulkerson 