What the hell are SOA and WOA

SOA = Service Oriented Architecture Wikipedia
WOA = Web Oriented Architecture WOA-REST Wiki

Both are methods for hooking discrete systems together thru various means. SOA has been bandied about in the press for the last 7 or 8 years. In my view it is a bus where one application can send its data to another. A simple example would be a web-part that can be placed on the bus and used by multiple applications for user authentication against Active Directory. This prevents the overhead of each application storing its own user credentials.

WOA is an emerging technology that holds a lot of promise, because it uses a URI connection as a component. In other words you can mash together web page URIs and arrive at a functioning personal environment in a fairly brief amount of time. Take a look at Yahoo Pipes for an example of this.