The week after next I'm speaking at AJAX World, and thus have been thinking a lot about AJAX and SOA. Also, just coauthored a book on AJAX, and yes I did the SOA Chapter.

AJAX is becoming the standard dynamic interface for the Web. AJAX adds value to SOA as well, providing the core-enabling technology for user interaction, no matter if we're dealing with applications that are remotely hosted, or applications that are local to the enterprise.

In essence, AJAX provides better edge technology for SOAs, or the top layer of technology dealing with the user interface. To this point, AJAX is able to extend visual service to a true interactive dynamic interface that's more attractive and functional for the end user.

The benefits of AJAX to the enterprise are clear, including:

The ability to leverage the same interface technology no matter if you’re dealing with local or remote sites or applications. What's key about AJAX is that many enterprises can agree that it's the standard interface technology, and as such, standardize on AJAX as the common user interface that's platform agnostic. Thus, it matters not if the AJAX interface is delivered on Windows, Linux, and / or the Mac. This makes deploying service-oriented enterprise applications that much easier, avoiding platform localization and testing issues.

The ability to leverage Web services using a more dynamic and rich interface than traditional browser technology. While the browser is functional for Web-based applications, the lack of interactive and dynamic behavior makes its use within the enterprise limiting. AJAX does not use the same "pump and pull" model that traditional HTTP-driven browser-based applications leverage. AJAX provides native-like application interfaces and performance, functioning as good as, or better than native interface APIs, such as Win32.

The ability to quickly create mashups to solve specific business problems using standard dynamic interfaces that front services. Mashups are powerful ways of taking existing applications and services, and creating something even more useful. AJAX provides better enabling technology to facilitate the creation of mashups, combining dynamic applications into a single interface with additional binding logic. Using this paradigm, enterprises can quickly create such useful mashups as integrating Google Maps with their delivery system.

AJAX has so much momentum behind it now that there is no stopping it's layering into the enterprise and SOA. SOA will leverage AJAX, and should leverage AJAX. But, as always, it's a matter of architecture.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on March 9, 2007 04:48 AM