by Dharmesh Mistry

You’ve finally got your head around service-oriented architecture (SOA) – but now a new acronym threatens to create panic amongst the IT organisation: web-oriented architecture (WOA).

WOA encompasses some big aims and hopes to spread the good work of service-orientation to web-based applications. Are the aims realistic, or are we really looking at the next piece of vendor spin?

Web-oriented architectures are easier to implement and offer a similar flexibility to SOA.

By Roger Smith

CIOs and system architects find themselves stymied as they try to sledgehammer complex SOAs into their enterprises. Top-down, "if you build it, they will come" approaches to service-oriented architecture often wind up failing--sometimes spectacularly. Instead of better aligning business processes and IT departments, as was promised, too many employees remain oblivious to expensive SOA initiatives. And those optimistic ROI projections? Forget 'em.