One more feedback is here…

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

I always felt that SOA is playing more and more important role in everyday life. But the problem I had was that I didn’t have a strong and deep feeling of the whole SOA idea and its benefits.

And now, when the course is over I am very happy with my intuition and general knowledge I gained. Actually, this course has slightly changed my way of thinking (toward architectures) and now I see more possibilities building services instead of standard applications. I can notice more ways of using existing services and making mashups from them.

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

The first practical impact of the course attendance was that I’ve decided to redesign the practical part of my Master thesis (Recognition of Mathematical Expressions) and provide my research results as a service on the web instead of initial plan to build a desktop application for that. You can even lookup the initial version here.

How do you see SOA being helpful in your professional environment? Please elaborate what would you suggest if you would become the chief system architect of your company for a day.

You can notice the trend that in business world the need of integrating different systems is growing every day. SOA in this case makes things easier by tens of time. And it means that the usage of SOA in business world would bring more additional value in a shorter time thus spending less money and effort.

How do you see SOA in 5 years from now? Please take both the “local” (LT) perspective and global one.

I truly think that the golden-time for SOA is just coming and going to be after 5-10 years. The whole web will be replaced by millions of services and billions of mashups. And you can notice that this process of change is getting faster nowadays. I really hope that Lithuanian developers will understand the benefits of SOA and will start using it where it is applicable.

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

The information you have is always uptodate, no big need for synchronizing or replicating data. The concept of “local” data does not exist here, so you can access the same information from any PC. Using this kind of computing you can also forget the terms like software installation, missing files and bad versions of libraries you have. It just makes thinks much easier.

The problem is that it is actually “online”. And still you can easily get to the situation where you could not get the access to the internet. Moreover, Murphy’s law can work here and the server containing the information you need at the moment can be down. And again, since everything is online, you must always consider the security risk.

How would you use Web 2.0 in a commercial projects?

Nowadays it is fashionable to have blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 stuff in commercial projects. It is a good practice when you have a big project team which is located in many different places in the world. The practice has shown that all this stuff helps creating people communities and this is a positive impact towards big commercial projects.

Moreover, I have seen several big projects successfully using wikis for their project documentation. It makes easy version tracking, more strictly structures the documentation (separate pages, etc) and makes it easy to find (we all know how sometimes it is so difficult to find the right file you are looking for).

How would have you organized this course if given a chance? What the lecturers did wrong and were good at?

As most of my colleagues mentioned, Saturday is really not the best time for a course, especially if you had a wild Friday night. The course title (Computer Networks) must be changed for sure because it was about everything except computer networks. The breaks were unpredictable long. Well, it would be not so bad if students would be informed about the exact break duration before the start of it. The evaluation system should be presented at the beginning of the course, but not in the second part of it. The idea of semester project was really great, but it should have been presented much earlier. Quite often it seemed that the lectures are not prepared and giving spontaneous talks.

I was very happy about the connection lecturers created between themselves and students. Giving plenty of realistic examples was very useful in order to get the ideas more easily. Inviting people from business world to give a talk was also a superior idea.

Justas Januskas