So, our course is going to the end and we need to finish our tasks too. I am happy that our practical project went successfully and I hope we will have a good presentation today. However, we still have one more task to do. Everyone should write a post about the course, SOA and everything that all these Saturdays gave to us.

This course was dedicated to SOA (Software Orientated Architecture). I have not heard much about it until I started to learn it here. Of course, SOA is used for a quite time but my work was never related to it. There is a lot of information in our days that we need to get in short period of time and realize its importance. Learning and job eats most of time, however, you should still to find the time to get your knowledge to higher level. Some of courses in master degree (like in bachelor too) are not very interesting to attend, however, I try to get as much as possible from them, other ones are interesting and even useful in the job or other private projects. This course was not ordinary one. It differed by his learning style, view to students and aim of it and even by time to attend J. I enjoyed a lot of discussion, references to the real life and practice. What is more, it was the first time during my study time when other guests from other companies and even other countries attended in lectures. It is always very important to know where is going in IT industry and what thinks IT companies directors and members in order to improve myself.

In long-tem perspective web applications, e-services becoming more and more complex and popular, various companies interact with each other more often. I am proposing that SOA or some derivative of it will become used even more widely. Just look at web services which are provided by Google, Yahoo and other big IT industry players. I expect that in short-time future I would need to work with projects that should be implemented by SOA principles. Because of this, I would have the start point which I gained here. It is not limited to SOA itself, but also about possible technologies, methods to use. Some of people can argue that you can do it yourself by reading articles in the internet or reading books, however I know that if you don’t have that starting point, you will not be able to improve further. In the other word the person should be pushed to do something. That’s one of the most important points for me.

If we will talk about web 2.0, I think it is already used in lots of commercial projects. Firstly, in most cases it provides better interaction between developers and users. Developer is not some secret person any more, now you can leave a comment to him, while he introduces where the project goes in development blogs. This leads to a better implementation and more important to greater usefulness of the service or product. Ability to get information from web services by using them from various providers gives flexibility and simplicity to project. You can add some interesting features to your web site without much effort. The good example of this was showed by Jonathan Briggs (http://www.gordonbrownforbritain.com/) where it is used youtube videos, google maps, flickr images combined with blogs and rss. He stated that everything was made in relatively short period of time. It is amazing.

There are things, that could be improved. Firstly, practical projects should be announced earlier (however end dates of them can be much earlier than semester ends). It would be great to have more talk about SOA itself and how it should be implemented. Students should be more involved into discussion (maybe, lecturers should try make more imaginative tasks, for example, to discuss how to find a valuable business vision, how to talk with potential clients of the product).

This is all for now.

Andrius Varanavičius