WOA and Rich Portals

Last year was the year of the ESB and Event Driven Architecture.  This year at the Gartner Integration Conference, it was about WOA (Web Oriented Architecture) and something I noticed by the initial discussion of Web 2.0.  This was further cemented by the attendence of Macromedia.  You may ask what is Macromedia doing at an integration conference?  Well, let me tell you.  We are at the advent of a 5 tier architecture; and it goes something like this – data, application, middleware, portal, rich interface.  This combination will allow for selected, tailored delivery of information that is reconstituted, mashedup for consumption on a very custom GUI, that in fact is not custom.  The better term here is “specific”.