Mashups/SOA Pushback

Wow, you never know until you post. I had a couple of e-mails…okay…let's call them nasty grams around my last post, people who did not want the term "mashups" sullied with the term "SOA." Nobody would go on the record, but the core message is that they view SOA as something that's "enterprisy," and mashups as much more innovative and not really enterprise related.

Not sure I agree with that. While indeed mashups are an innovative way of building very cool applications from many available resources, visual and non-visual, they are still composite applications. While I'm seeing mashups that are completely Web-hosted, I'm seeing more and more that are a mix of Web and enterprise resources, as well as mashups that are true "enterprise mashups."

While mashups did not emerge from the core concepts of SOA, they indeed provide some core SOA mechanisms, including:

• The ability to place volatility into a single domain, thus allowing for changes, thus allowing for agility.
• The ability to leverage services, both for information and behavior.
• The ability to bind together many backend systems, making new and innovative uses of those systems.

This, however, does not mean that mashups are not innovative, clearly they are. Moreover, it does not mean that mashups are not extensions of the core notion of SOA. Remember, SOA is not a term, it's an architecture pattern.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on May 21, 2008 09:59 AM