I'm at AJAX World this week in New York. In attending the cocktail parties and vendor functions I've been hearing the same pitch over and over again..."AJAX is the face of SOA." So, is this true? Or, is this another "SOA 2.0" kind of a thing? A couple of things come to mind: First, SOA does need a common user interface. One of things that are difficult when explaining the value of SOA is that there is no standa I’m at AJAX World this week in New York. In attending the cocktail parties and vendor functions I’ve been hearing the same pitch over and over again…”AJAX is the face of SOA.”So, is this true? Or, is this another “SOA 2.0” kind of a thing? A couple of things come to mind:First, SOA does need a common user interface. One of things that are difficult when explaining the value of SOA is that there is no standard way to externalize the value of services, we instead do so using many eclectic ways depending on the needs of the problem domain. AJAX is built to work easily with Web services, and thus services that are exposed within the workings of a SOA are easily leveraged within an AJAX-enabled application. Second, we may be over simplifying the problem. While it’s easy to draw a lot of service and place a user interface on them, that’s really not SOA. A SOA lives to provide an oderly and changeable interaction among systems, that’s its primary role. Serving a user interface is clearly second. So, while I’m seeing a lot of AJAX user interfaces on SOA clouds this week, the fact is the value still resides in the cloud. Hey, but when in Rome…Go AJAX! Software Development