A couple of weeks ago I had a workshop with a customer management team on the topics of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). I was chatting away about upwards integration with service orientation and downwards governance by ‘thinking in services’, and all this facilitated by the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Then the question came: “But do you actually need a physical service bus?”.

Eeeeh…. There goes my well prepared storyline….

But I remembered following some discussion in the blogosphere on the concept of Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) in the beginning of this year. With interest, I might add.  So my answer was: “Well no, I don’t think so.”

The concept and principles of SOA can apply to architectures, without the use of software suites and hardware platform making this possible. But how exactly?

To find out, I decided to dive in to the matter (again), and see how far along thought on the topic had developed in the blogosphere. Although there is some info scattered around the net, I was a bit disappointed. This is why I decided to create this place to facilitate a discussion on the topic, to see if we can come up with some practical and useful material.

I’ll be writing some thoughts down, hoping to get feedback, and will be actively searching for it. Also, all ‘on topic’ links I will gather here, so this can become a central point of reference.