Last week WSO2 released a REST-based SOA registry, joining Mulesource, which released a REST-based SOA registry in January. Together they’re doing something we haven’t seen a lot of in the SOA space over the past few years: they’re innovating.

So much energy has been poured into establishing standards, building out distinct product markets and fleshing out platforms that it’s been a while since we’ve seen much in the way of innovation. Early in this decade the ESB, the services registry, Web services management software and XML networking hardware pushed the IT envelope. They gave users a way to combine applications in a whole new way. Suddenly component assembly was on the table and loosely coupled, autonomous, stateless, composable, reusable services moved from theory to reality.

The REST-based registry isn’t likely to create that sort of paradigm shift, but it does shake up a marketplace that may be getting a bit complacent. Both of these releases are open source and both try to support the service-oriented concept of discoverability without using the UDDI standard. You might be asking, isn’t SOA supposed to be standards-based? Well, yes, it is, but that doesn’t mean that UDDI has to be one of those standards. REST is built on the HTTP standard. It also opens up the question of how can we better enable the princples of service orientation?

I’m not implying WSO2 and Mulesource have found a better way to build a registry, UDDI may still be the gold standard as far as that’s concerned, but they have opened up the subject for debate by attacking discoverability in a new way. They also might be setting the table for the next wave of innovation in SOA. Going back to a December podcast with Forrester Research’s John Rymer, the area of dynamic business applications begs for real-time innovation. Perhaps Microsoft’s Oslo initiative will break ground in model-driven design. IBM may be unveiling its REST-based Project Zero this spring.

Wherever the innovation comes from, we need to remember that it will come. We’ve been conditioned to think of SOA as a set of products and standards that popped up seven years ago, but what it really entails is an approach to technology that will allow you to best incorporate the next wave of innovation … and the one after that … and the one after that. These REST-based registries may be the precursors of advances to come.

Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ve probably heard by now that Microsoft has placed a $44.6 billion bid to buy Yahoo!.

We’ll leave it to others to ponder the Wall St. implications of the move, but in her All about Microsoft blog, Mary Jo Foley posits “a Yahoo! purchase would irrevocably change the kind of company Microsoft is.” Foley focuses on advertising in her comments, but it could represent a change in Microsoft’s application development focus. Microsoft built itself around operating systems and desktop applications, the things you do with a computer. Of course, with the advent of the Internet, what you do with a computer has changed radically. Yahoo! and Google have made hay in offering up Web-based applications, leveraging search capabilities and creating dynamic user portals.

Microsoft has tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to gain a dominant position in those arenas. While Dana Gardner speculates a Microsoft-Google partnership might be a mess, it could represent a return to Microsoft’s core applications business. Yahoo! and Silverlight (for RIA and composite apps) represent where the next wave of applications are headed. On the enterprise side, easily distributed Web apps and multimedia mashups are where a lot of companies want to go. It’s where the innovation is and for Microsoft, a company which has always fancied itself an innovator, that’s a good place to be. There are those who think enterprise mashups will be the killer app once users get a service-oriented architecture in place, the idea being that a loosely coupled infrastructure will lead to dynamic new applications.

It’s no secret Microsoft has long faced criticism in SOA circles because its remedy for users grappling with a heterogeneous application environment has been to pursue homogeneity on the .NET platform. Microsoft’s Oslo model-driven development initiative is still in the planning stages, but a Yahoo! purchase begs the question “Why bother with application infrastructure?” Obviously no one expects Microsoft to pull its irons completely out of that fire, but if that’s not going to be a big growth area for the good folks in Redmond (and IBM and Oracle/BEA are gobbling up large chunks of that pie) then maybe it makes more sense to concentrate on New Wave application development. Microsoft could make leveraging service orientation its app dev enterprise play rather than implementing service orientation.

Let someone else do the tedious work and be the company that does the cool stuff.

There’s so many facets to this offer that it’s impossible to assess the true implications of a Microsoft/Yahoo! merger, but going after Yahoo! does indicate where Redmond’s heart is. If Microsoft really wanted to pursue application infrastructure, BEA Systems was a completely complimentary acquisition target. It would have given Microsoft unparalled reach across the .NET and Java platforms. Yet it didn’t make that play. Instead it’s made a Web play which could build on top of of what the application infrastructure vendors provide, potentially expanding its enterprise app dev audience well beyond the .NET platform.