Google Sites Pros and Cons and how it fits as SaaS/FaaS into SOA?

Pros:

Free site-creation and hosting service
After clicking Create a Site button, it takes you to a page requiring a mere five entries.  You name the site, choose a URL in the form sites.google.com/site/your site name, and
enter a short text description of your site’s purpose. You must decide whether to restrict the site to those you share it with (entering their e- mail addresses) and then you can choose one of 20, simple, well-designed theme templates.

Simple interface
It attracts many nontechnical would-be site builders because of Google’s reputation for dead simple interfaces

Lots of gadgets to add to your pages
You can add gadgets to any page, but Dashboards are preformatted with a grid of content areas for them. Dashboard pages are for assembling Gadgets, which can be standard Web items,
such as links and pictures; Google services like calendars, Picasa Web slideshows, spreadsheets, and YouTube videos.

Saves previous versions of your site
This feature lets you revert to any earlier saved version of your site, like subversion or other version control systems you are able to rollback. If you have collaborators to edit you site, you can subscribe to any changes made to it.

Use of Google Analytics
A big plus with Google Sites is the ability to use Google Analytics for the site you’ve   built, which provides good analytical information about your site.

How does Google Sites fit our definition of SaaS/FaaS?

Google Sites allows a user to establish a Web site and provides the tools necessary to customize that site for a particular business.

If the Web site needs creative customization, Google sites has the necessary tools through their Google Apps SaaS productivity suite. The user connects to Google via an Internet browser and uses the software available to develop a custom resource management solution. There is also no need to pay for ISP services. A WiFi link, a computer, and a gmail account are all that are needed to set up a Web site. Regarding security, SaaSCloak uses GnuPG encryption to encrypt individual documents on Google Sites and that is a very good plus.

First I like to start by defining SOA in a general term which is a flexible set of design principles used during the phases of systems development and integration in computer that almost all architects somehow play with it. As for how Saas/Faas system like Google site fit into this picture we need to delve a little bit into SOA first.

Usually the dilemma of applying SOA comes to picture when EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) is not for data integration issues. In SOA we have apply point to point connectivity most of the time although generally we are after loosely coupled architecture but in reality unfortunately is not happening. Key elements that an architect needs to consider are : data semantics, data quality, data accesss, data governance and buld data processing and usually there is a mediation layer to tackel these data integration challenges. So what is happening is usually we come up with a mediation layer to cover these steps: Import modules in a way to preserve the relationships and constraints and defining rules and mapping to enforce the constraints and eventually by testing and impact analysis, we ensure we have a tool that captures all the flaws and promote reuse. This tool also should be able to track the new models and connected applications.

Now after going through all of these architectural goals, we can say from Architectural point of view, Google Sites actually covers it all, as it is modularized and does enforce the data constraints and it is almost easy to integrate and update with new modules. Therefore we can consider Google Sites as a Software or Feature of a service built in mediation layer to converge most of the other modules and servcies.

Hope this helps to understand the concept as it is pretty high level but it has enough depth to engage you.

Enjoy, C