> I personally think that ROA is a subset of SOA that constrains the set of
> services to the HTTP verbs but opens up the types of data that the services
> can operate on to the very abstract notion of a resource.
This was basically my opinion, with the feeling that SOA is much more
generalized a concept than REST, and as such SOA is useful for
diagramming the operations of a business only some of which might
relate to REST or be implementable in such an architecture, but from a
technical viewpoint to talk of REST for any particular solution is
more productive for understanding that solution because REST is less
generic (if the specific requirements of REST do not meet the
architectural needs of the solution this is also productive) whereas
talking of the more generic SOA specific to technology for me as a
technician doesn't tell me much.

>Others seem to
> think that SOA is the subset of ROA where the set of resources is
> constrained to be service endpoints. I've served my time in Hell trying to
> referee that debate (in the W3C Web Services Architecture WG) and don't want
> to participate anymore, but go to it if you want :-)

I had never even considered this.

Cheers,
Bryan Rasmussen