Mention Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in a techie related conversation and you’ll be viewed as someone who knows the cutting edge of IT. (Explain SOA correctly and you may even get some bonus points along the way too.) While SOA is not a term which can easily be defined with a great amount of clarity (what do you expect, its an architecture), one common theme that is present is the use of web services in the implementation of a SOA.

However, don’t get too comfortable in the lime light. Web services are making way for a new, bleeding-edge class of solutions. Cloud services are web services offered in a cloud computing environment. It is even being suggested that an open protocol called XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) could be one of the keys to forging a path to this new architecture. One of the main uses of XMPP is IM. Ever heard of Google Talk? Guess what protocol is behind it? Implementing a Jabber server is relatively easy. iDimensionz has a Jabber server running on one of our servers. With that kind of ease of use and the pervasiveness of an open protocol (and open source applications like Pidgin to support it), will cloud services descend to Earth for use by the masses or remain floating high out of reach?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Technology, architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.