Today’s spring seminar of Service-Oriented Architecture Subject Interest Group (SOA SIG) featured three great presentations that lightened the subject of Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) from complementary angles.

First, Tuomo Sahipakka of Logica gave an excellent introductory presentation to WOA and the architectural style of REST. He pointed out that REST brings the same agility and scalability as the WWW. Carefully avoiding an outright confrontation with RPC-style and Web Service standards, he posed a few provocative questions to the audience that made us come to the conclusion ourselves that there may, indeed, be something inherently awkward in using WS-flavored SOA: first one needs to find the WSDL description, then understand it, then generate code, then wrestle with interoperability issues… In contrast, RESTful WOA will provide scalable, expandable, interoperable and secure architecture of high performance.

Joni Niemi, VTT, showed an interesting demo of hubi.fi — a portal for developing and testing ubique social applications for the citizens of Helsinki metropolitan area. None of the Hubi services, such as event recommendations, bus schedules or meteorological information, were unique in their own right, but the portal appears to provide a platform for very powerful mashup applications that combine services with geographic information. One example of a cool service integrated in the portal is the vehicle location service of Helsinki City Transport.

Last but not least, Janne Kalliola, Exove, gave an insightful presentation on Web APIs. He spoke from experience about the very latest technologies and provided some practical recommendations on how to design and implement such interfaces.

Thanks to all the speakers and to the small yet attentive and inquisitive audience for an educational morning at the upslope of the hype cycle!

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