This blog is beginning to get overwhelmed by feedback posts and I’m putting in my 2 cents worth..

What is the added value of attending this course for you?

To tell the truth, I hadn’t known what SOA stood for before I enrolled on this course. I knew there were web services and I knew how to use them, I saw all the hype with blogging, RSS feeds, myspaces and youtubes, but I could never imagine that this whole trend could be standartized into some form of architectural style. So it was great for me to see the big picture. I got some new potential business ideas for future, or to put it differently, I now have a different way of trying to come up with a business idea, thanks to SOA. Still, the name of the course (Computer Networks) is totally misleading and should definitely be changed in the future.

Presentations of our foreign guests were good, but somewhat misplaced. I mean, Johnatan came at the end of the semester and started with a presentation of the basics “what is SOA”. I was hoping for some deeper analysis of questionable aspects of SOA, which he did later, but I just feel that some time could be saved by cutting the basics. And it all ended too late, so we were to tired to start a discussion, which I would have liked a lot. Presentation by Mrs Svirskiene had some fresh and interesting thoughts, a strong practical point of view, but in my opinion lacked cohesion. I didn’t really understand the goal of the presentation, a summary of some kind would also be good, because it made some of the teams make false conclusions, such as that WSDL is enough to document a web service.

What is the immediate benefit for you in your current professional situation?

As I said, I have a new way of looking at potential business ideas. Business no longer has to be expensive to start up with lots of coding, cutting edge technologies, etc. The most important thing is a killer idea whilst the functionality is most probably already available and could be reused – the Internet is full of it, free or not. In my current job, there’s not much direct benefit from the course. Possibly with the exception of the fact that I now know what web services are really meant for and when it is better to use remoting, RPC and other faster technologies.

How do you see SOA being helpful in your professional environment?

We are developing a document management system in our company and we are going to use an Estonian webservice to implement digital signature via mobile phones. The number of webservices is inevitably going to grow in the future, so I believe, there are some more integration projects to come. It’s great to see how immense functionality can be used with practically no effort.

How do you see SOA in 5 years from now?

I hope to see a trend towards standartizing the available services. Really good ones should become popular and be really widely used while poorly documented and unreliable ones should lose popularity. So it’s a certain vision of monopolization. Well, unavoidably, more and more services will be appearing. I especially hope that Lithuanian developers will understand this trend too and will create services to leverage banking data, governmental services, mapping data, traffic data, etc. I have many ideas that could be implemented if only these services were available in our country.

What are the pros and cons of “totally online” computing?

Pros: wide availability of functionality, immense computing power without buying expensive hardware, shorter and cheaper projects, easier deployment and maintainability.

Cons: loose couping, lack of standartization, possibility of incompatibility after modification, connectivity is still not ubiquitous or sufficiently fast. If you’re lacking a certain small piece of functionality in a service, it can be incredibly difficult to get it. If some of the services you are using go down, you’re going to smell some big trouble.

How would you use Web 2.0 in commercial projects?

I personally hate blogs and myspace. I mean the idea that you can have your own website with a picture gallery and a journal is older than life. What occurs to me is that someone took an old idea, made it more accessible (so that even my grandmother could create her web space) and gained enormous popularity. So in my commercial projects, you will not see wikis, blogs, flickr photos or embedded youtube videos. I just might be aiming to a different public. But I would definitely take the whole trend into account and I’d gladly use professionally made services, such as Microsoft MapPoint and would allow my users to publish their comments and content, if only this was appropriate.

How would have you organized this course if given a chance? Please think both from the contents and the form perspective.

What the lecturers did wrong?What the lecturers were good at?

I’ll talk about both questions in one go, because they are really related. Well, first of all  the course should have a different name (not computer networks). Secondly – saturdays is a bad choice. I’m a working person and I can put up with the idea of wasted evenings during the weekdays. But weekend – is a sacred thing. Some of us plan to leave city and like to do that on Fridays. Others have extracurricular activities that have been undertaken for years are scheduled for weekends. So I really appreciate that one of the lecturers had to fly from France, but it was a sacrifice both for him and for us. I sincerely believe, there can be a solution when no one has to sacrifice their time. I mean if someone (especially with such a bright mind as Adomas) chooses to leave the country and work abroad, it’s a pity for everyone here. But as someone said, there are no irreplaceable people. Even if really Saturdays were the only option, giving TWO points for attendance is inadequate. But thankfully, there were ways to make up for the lost points.

As most of others said, the lectures were too long. Not in the sense of giving too much information in one go, but giving too little information in too much time. I would shorten everything to 2-3 hours with a 15 min. break.

Another thing – lack of preparation. Spontaneous talking was put as an advantage of this course and as modern way of having lectures, but I understand spontaneous talking a bit differently. Firstly, each lecture should have at least a vision if not a plan. The visions of all lectures should come together into a big and cohesive picture. A vision does not have to be too concrete (if avoiding traditional teaching methodology is sought) but it must exist. The lecturer should prepare at home to talk about different topics and then let the audience guide the presentation. The way things seemed to be happening now was that at times, a lecturer would start talking according to a spontaneous topic that he has some general knowledge about, but he wasn’t preparing to talk about. Take for example project management. We (at least former Software engineering students) had several good and exhaustive courses on project management. And we really had them structured, full of real world examples and it really came together into a big picture. During one of SOA sessions, one of the lecturers started talking spontaneously about project management, grasped the surface of topic A, barely touched topic B, etc. The result was that a lot of time was consumed, more questions raised than answered and not many ideas that ware presented could be reused, because everything was too superficial. What could have been done in this situation – the lecturer could prepare before the lecture and think about “how project management in other projects is different from SOA projects? How small team projects are unique? Which aspects of project management would I like to present to the students of this course? What knowledge do they currently possess? How does it all fit into the series of our sessions?”

I really liked it when lecturers gave plenty of real world examples. The ability to start a discussion in a group is also very valuable. I liked that we were told about things that are happening and that are being created today, not about some old fashioned 70s approaches that the lecturer once learned when still studying. It’s just perfect that communication media for this course (this blog with all the add-ins) was web 2.0 based. Kind of “practice what you preach” approach. And the team projects were pretty interesting – something completely different from what I was used to. Not another C or Java application, implementing pizza delivery or library software that no one would ever use. Still I wouldn’t use wiki as a space for my project documentation, but I have at least tried and now have an opinion.

In any case, both of the lecturers did a great job. It took quite some time and devotion to make this whole course happen. And you can’t expect to get everything right the first time. I believe that next year it will be much better. Thank you guys and may SOA be all over you.

Ugnius Keturka