Using SPDY in a SOA architecture

Question

I have a lot of experience over the last few years working with and designing SOA systems that rely on HTTP to talk to each other. I got to wondering what an SOA architecture that leveraged SPDY would look like. I'm no networking expert, but it seems to me that the performance enhancements of SPDY could be useful for service-to-service communication as well as browser communication.

1) What are the implications of using SPDY for a SOA in general?

and

2) What would be involved in adapting existing web app frameworks, like Rails or Grails, to use SPDY? Would it be as simple as pairing them up with a web server that spoke SPDY?

Answer 1

1. Approximately none; SOA is an architectural style, and SPDY is a low level transport. Anything that you do with HTTP is more or less equivalent with SPDY, and neither is really anything but an implementation detail of your SOA work.

2. The latter, more or less, would do. Taking full advantage might require more cooperation for, eg, ordering responses better, but the practical difference is approximately zero.