I have just finished reading Web 2.0 Architecture: What Entrepreneurs and Architects need to know. A rather good book which pulls together content from an awful lot of places.
My thinking on the topic is that Web 2.0 is a bit of a marketing type term that does not solidly define anything; here is my take on what it means to the Enterprise Architect:
The idea of patterns is an approach that has been around a while, in TOGAF it is still emerging and only has a seed definition http://www.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf8-doc/arch/chap28.html\nIn my mind I think of it simply as “an abstract definition of a solution that can be sensibly reused to solve similar problems without reinventing the wheel”.
What I liked about the book was the identification of a collection of patterns that can be used to match against common problems that have been solved well by several recent .com success stories like facebook, twitter, youtube etc.\n\nSo in a nutshell Web 2.0 is a collection of 12 abstract solutions (patterns). I plan to dig into each of them to throw my own spin on them in later blogs, these include:
- Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Participation Collaboration
- Asynchronous Particle Update
- Mashup
- Rich User Experience
- Synchronised Web
- Collaborative Tagging
- Declarative Living and Tag Gardening
- Semantic Web Grounding
- Persistent Rights Management
- Structured Information
The key message here is that patterns can and have been used to great success. Reusing them should enable some clear thinking on what problems the business need to solve instead of reinventing solutions.