SOA: Trends and Directions

While many organizations have adopted SOA there are recent indications that not all organizations are willing to make substantial investments in new skills and technologies required for the transition to SOA in the current economic climate. The recent emergence of Cloud Computing is continuing the trend of delivering enterprise applications and IT infrastructure in the form of externally sourced services, providing an alternative to on-premise solutions. The convergence of Cloud Computing and Web 2.0 is redefining the very basis on which the computer industry has operated for decades, challenging some of the basic SOA assumptions and principles. In this paper we discuss the synergies between the above technology trends and consider the likely impact of these trends on enterprise computing

Web 2.0: Building Enterprise Portals

Various types of Web resources are being made available programmatically using APIs and through data feeds, facilitating the development of highly interactive applications with rich media content - the so called Web 2.0 applications. Most current Web 2.0 applications are simple mashups that combine information from multiple sources and provide a Windows-like user interface. More sophisticated Web programming techniques based on portable and reusable application components are becoming available and enable the construction ofhighly innovative applications that deliver real business value to organizations. In this paper we discuss the challenges of developing Web 2.0 applications and describe the design of an advanced mashup application, the Lenovo Olympic Podium, that illustrates the potential of Web 2.0