John Michelsen, chief scientist at iTKO Inc., the service-oriented architecture (SOA) testing and governance provider, believes developers do not have to chose between Web-oriented architecture (WOA) based on a simple Representational State Transfer (REST) approach and SOA following the WS-* standards. "It's not an either/or question," he says in the following interview from Integration World 2007 this week in Orlando, Florida. However, he does argue that the advocates of WOA with REST have gone too far in simplification and advocates of SOA with the WS-* standards have gone to far in regulation. He believes both sides need to find a middle road that uses practical governance.

First of all what are we talking about when we talk about WOA?
John Michelsen: A number of people here are defining WOA, appropriately, I think, as a way to do SOA. It's not that it's a different thing. SOA is a pattern or a way of doing application design with certain principles in mind. WOA is a way to implement SOA. It goes one step further and says take those principles and here are some of the technologies you could or should use to realize that service orientation. It's a continuation of the SOA versus REST discussion. It's not an either/or question. REST is the grassroots way of doing SOA, while WS-* style WSDL-based SOA is the top down way. The WOA discussion is just continuing talking about those two different paths.