Michael Platt talks about SOA vs. Web 2.0 He provides several links to blogs and article  that basically claim that SOA is dead and long live the new king Web 2.0.

One thing I have to say is that if indeed the hype around SOA is starting to calm - this is a very good sign. Finally we can go about adding SOA to our toolset and use it when it is appropriate (not just because management has got to have an SOA). Also it can be a good sign that SOA is maturing.

Another point I'd like to make is that SOA and Web 2.0 are not really related - there is no reason why one should compete with the other. Why using an AJAX front-end makes it impossible to have Services in the backend (it may be appropriate to have a Client/Server/Service Scenario - where the front-ends don't hit the services directly (the other option is Peer/Service) - I may talk about these 2 mini-patterns in my SOA pattern series). Another example where SOA and Web 2.0 can work together is RSS. A service can expose its list of recent changes as an RSS feed (as well as providing the more "traditional" web-services API). Exposing an RSS feed can be an option to implement the Inversion of Communication pattern I mentioned in a previous post).

To sum things up - Web 2.0 may be more hyped today than SOA. Web 2.0 and SOA can co-exist and actually complement each other.

In any event I think we (as an industry) should focus more on delivering great applications and solutions rather than fight about whose trend-du-jour is fancier or sexier.

[Edited]

After writing about the example of using RSS for Service communication I stumbled today on RSSBus which is an effort to create an ESB on top of RSS protocol ...