From SOA buzzwords to WS-Confusion and back to Earth

There were questions about the final marks – when they will be announced.

Unfortunately I can’t answer this question without discussing this with Giedrius and I was not able to reach him recently.

Well, I guess the best thing to do is to send (or keep sending) emails to me and Giedrius (gzlatkus@gmail.com)… I am sorry for the delay.

I am personally much less involved into the operational marking of your efforts than I was in “architecting” the course (no matter how ad-hoc it looked at the end)…

Once again, thanks very much for your valuable feedback (IMHO it was the first time of such two-way dialogue at MIF), I will try to sum your posts up an respond with some concluding remarks shortly.

Not only feedback I want to thank you for – I was able to get a lot of inspiration from you guys and you (unknowingly) served as a secret weapon in some battles I had recently I used your projects to energize and provoke colleagues of my projects by stating “c’mon fellas, show some pride and enthusiasm, my students from VU MIF can outperform you easily!”. It helped. Still I think some of you would outdo them

During our last meeting last Saturday, all of the teams were able to present their projects and put their weeks or months of hard work for public judgement. Some felt valued, some felt underrepresented, some must have thought that the public didn’t understand what their team wanted to express and did not see how hard in fact they worked. And they were right. No matter how much effort you put into a project and no matter how big, stable and sophisticated your creation is, the public only has a few minutes to learn about it and evaluate it. And it’s how you present it that matters.

I don’t claim to be a presentation guru or the mr. know-it-all. But I did have some damn good presentations in my life, I took part in a few presentation-related courses, read some theory and I used to analyze the way others present ideas and track down the common mistakes that they make.

So what I would like to present here is a list of some most relevant presentation tips that I gathered from my own experience and a variety of other sources. This is not directly SOA-related stuff, but in any business or academic environment a good presenter is priceless. And we all agreed that our presentations last Saturday were not really top notch. So here it goes (and feel free to post your tips and tricks or links in the comments).

(more…)

So the lessons are over and the last thing is needed to do. So I post my feedback in our Wiki maybe this way I make A. Svirskas and G. Zlatkus to come and see our project documentations and our wiki In Lithuanian it is said „Niekas nepakels šuniui uodegos kaip jis pats“ or something like that

“Mashing it up” is nice. “Mashing it up” is cool. “Mashing it up” is the way to go.

Or not.

At least in some cases most of the buisiness use-cases .

(more…)

At last I can introduce our team and project, called very simple: “Fuel prices“. Actually, we were the first who launched our personal wikipedia (not wiki spaces, but the real wiki media project, and in 2 languages =] ), but the last to publish it… This is life After a bit polish it is leastwise not a shame to post a link

The main idea is to collect fuel prices from the web and present it as a web service which could serve clients with the cheapest fuel prices (expressed in any currency) and other useful methods. Other details you’ll find in our wiki, which, let be honest, is not yet absolutely finished…

Actually, project is practically done, but you can’t yet access front-end (web user interface) because everything is hosted on my private Ubuntu server and we have some problems deploying .NET web service (.NET + unix = headache). If everything continues like this we will be forced to demonstrate our system on localhost during the Saturdays lecture But this is not a problem. Despite this, you can test user interface of our first WS (it is written in Ruby and successfully deployed on Unix) , which is responsible for manual adding of fuel prices (Ruby + Unix = muscle).

Updated: now you can access beta web user interface (it is yet being polished) and documentation following www.strikeiron.com

Mashups: The next major new software development model?

Greetings from Vienna (airport only…), on the way back from Thessaloniki & Meteora.

… from the oblivion

We are called ElbO.

Our goal is to combine weather forecast, driving directions and location map services into one easy to use place. It is described in greater detail here.

Should you have any questions or some more specific info – I’m your man, contact me at kazimieras.pociunas eta gmail.com.

Thats pretty much it and it MEGA-hurtz to me, that i could not participate in the lecture-conference last Saturday, but family business tend to win in this kind of “contests” . I hope you all really enjoyed it and that the main conclusion of postmortem discussion (if there was any?) was “we want/need more!”

Good morning!

As planned, Jonathan and Diana are in town and will join us tomorrow.

Jonathan offered me a fruit dessert – we’ve had a dinner, I am keen to let you know that he will bring more of that treat tomorrow morning

See ya.

Once again, as requested, I am posting info about the 12th of May:

The tentative topics (to be freely interpreted by the speakers and influenced by the audience):

• Business software and software business in London and beyond – corporate and personal views from The Square Mile (with SOA in the backdrop at all times).
• Web services on Rails – Building Web services application with Ruby on Rails. I chose an appetizer for this session… Amazon S3 is very SOA

The speakers are:

• Jonathan Briggs – Strategy Director, the OTHER media & Professor, Kingston University London
• Diana Svirskiene – Project & QA Manager, Merrill Lynch UK and beyond (previously BNP Paribas UK and Thoughtworks UK)
• Justas “The Chaser” Janauskas – Chief ERP Software Architect at Alna Business Solutions and a master-level computer science student here at Vilnius University, MIF

Working language of the session language will be English.

We will use the VU MIF channels to make this information available to a broader audience, please feel free to invite people who might be interested.

I would like to point to the discussion the tigers had on the way to their architecture. This experience can be useful to the other teams. I would also want to thank Justas J. for his mini-tutorial on solution design last Friday.

Justas has volunteered to shed some light on the WS on Rails next time. I think this is great, I just need to work out the packed schedule of the next seminar.

I really enjoyed Adomas talking about his early career on some previous lecture, how inovations (and buzzwords ) helped him and how he benefited from it. And have been thinking a lot about it and I think that makes sense. Although I have found an interesting blog post by Shahid N. Shah why tools and buzz-technologies should not be chosen to help a career. Authors says that “Just don’t choose a tool or product … because a developer wants to “learn the tool” at your customer’s expense!”. Well, that also makes sense .

Thanks to all of you (esp. the tigers & the panthers) – they made their work available online) for interesting presentations of your ideas yesterday – it was fun to discuss the projects and brainstorm together!

Now it is time for you to think about the implementations of your first prototypes (those who haven’t thought through your business ideas and solution concepts are urged to do that pronto – next Saturday, the 28th of April is the last date to present your project ideas).

One of the first questions I was facing myself when trying to get some WS solution to work was the followig: where do I start from? Do I code in Java (C#…) my classes first and then generate WSDL or do I produce WSDL and then derive classes? That’s not an easy one, I must say.

Of course, many more bright heads were having the same problem for a while, therefore you will be able to google for an advice or two. Here is one link to start with -
Contract-First or Code-First Design (thanks to Jelena for suggesting this). I hope you will find the discussion fut to read, as I did

When it comes to the practical end, there are some guys who firmly believe in code-first approach and they came up with a product, which helps to enunciate your services. I hope the tool is as good as some claims about it.

OK, this was a short post, hope it will help in some ways. Wish me luck in Brussels on Wednesday

And one more link – take a journey through shared services – experience of BEA Systems in the city of Chicago… I was listening for this presentation on Wednesday in London and found it interesting.

All the best.

Hi All,

There is some good news for May – two interesting and knowledgeable persons will most likely join us on 12th of May for a session “Business software and software business in London and beyond – corporate and personal views from The Square Mile”. The speakers are:

• Jonathan Briggs – Strategy Director, the OTHER media & Professor, Kingston University London
• Diana Svirskiene – Project & QA Manager, Merrill Lynch UK and beyond (previously BNP Paribas UK and Thoughtworks UK)

I am very glad that Jonathan and Diana promised to find time and spend few hours with us.

Diana will be between the trips to Merrill Lynch offices in New York and Hong Kong where she will be coordinating global deployment of an investment banking solution, while Jonathan is always on the move somewhere Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope their plans will not change.

Please book your calendars.

Myself, I will be with you this upcoming Saturday and the next one as well. There is a catch however – I need to hop between the flights in Nice this morning (in a few hours, in fact) – my BA flight from London is due to land at 9:45 in Nice and my LH flight to Frankfurt-Vilnius is scheduled for 11:00. So… I printed my boarding cards “at home” and just hope that there will be no delays at London Gatwick and I will do the trick. Otherwise… well, otherwise I will come on Friday to join you on Saturday

I was privileged to attend a round-table discussion dinner with top-tier UK Government IT architects last evening for an interesting discussion about the role of SOA in Transformational Government. The event (organized by BEA Systems) was interesting, will share some thoughts with you. The things I heard there will also help me to defend the ground of the R4eGov project at the review meeting in Brussels next week.

Best regards, still from my beloved London, en route {Nice-London-Nice-Vilnius-Brussels-Vilnius-(kayak daytrip, Ula river)-Nice}

Gotta pack and catch my red-eye flight.

Well, we have just sailed past the 3/4 mark of the course – I want to thank Jelena for an interesting presentation, which sparked a lot of discussions around it. Of course, we all are experts in basketball and GIS I hope she will share the slides with us. Let’s also thank Giedrius for providing 3G connection

Anyway, we have got two months to kill (2 more Saturdays booked – 21st and 28th of April, mark your diaries) and two more are in the pipeline (tentatively) for May. However we must also think about the prizes (exam marks) and we want to make the process of getting them enjoyable, don’t we?

So… in the spirit of this course where we try to turn many tables around, we wanted to discuss the ideas how YOU get marked with YOU And we did so, as the picture testifies:

Now, what’s this? Well, this is the blueprint of the contract – our common agreement about what we think is fair when it comes to showing your capacity & skills.

For full clarity and especially for those who were not with us, let me translate (again, this will need to be discussed/approved):

The exam mark will consist of:

• A reward for attendance – 2 points
• A reward for activity – posts/comments – 1 point. Blasting me for wearing the FR football scarf may very well set you back by minus 2 points I may wear the LT scarf in Nantes – come and join me
• A reward for a team project – 5 points
• A reward for making a presentation – 2 points

The project reward consists of:

• Soundness of the business vision -1 point
• Excellence of conceptual and technical architecture – 1.5 points
• Completeness of implementation – 1.5 point
• Overall marketable value: look and feel, description etc. – think in www.strikeiron.com way about your service – 1 point

In addition:

• Excellence of the project “process” site, such as project wiki – 4 points to share between the team members – you will decide yourself how you will split that
• Peers’ praise – i.e. if other teams think your project is cool, they can award other teams giving maximum 4 points for a single team (out of 6 points total “team prize fund”, which each team is given to show their appreciation of others’ work). No team cannot use the prize fund to award themselves of course.

And more:

• Within a team, it is possible to give up to 3 points voluntarily if someone feels he or she was slacking and was getting a free ride by the rest of the team. And vice versa – a “troika” (three members voting unanimously) have the powers to strip the fourth member by 3 points maximum if the latter will have underperformed yet thinks “well, no big deal…”.

The idea of the project is to think of some added value, which can be sold to some customers by providing them with a service (simple or aggregated/composite), which takes some data/functionality from somewhere and presents it in an SOA way (WS/SOAP or REST) in a clean and marketable way. Let me repeat – there must be a realistic business-value component involved in your solution. The more real – the better.

You are free to choose the platform + tools, as long as they adhere to the WS/REST standards.

Each project needs to be implemented by a team of 4 people, please team-up and set up a point of contact (blog, wiki etc) to make the project transparent. Make sure you will be using social software to communicate – this is NOT optional. Please be quick to avoid being left behind and work in an incomplete team, which will mean less fun and more work for you. Unless you are a die-hard individualist, of course, but then you will face some problems anyway.

Additional rule: if someone is left behind to work alone (imagine that we have 29 people) then the last full team to register will need to ask someone from their ranks to volunteer and join the poor lone soul Translation: be quick to team up.

There is also a “qualifying prerequisite” (or the final seal, if you want) to be eligible for the mark:You will need to write a thoughtful post, which would shed some light on your thoughts about:

• What is the added value (if any) of attending this course for you, as a future software systems architect (please maintain this longer-term perspective)?
• What is the immediate benefit for you (if any) in your current professional situation?
• How do you see SOA being helpful in your professional environment? Please elaborate what would you suggest if you would become the chief systems architect of your company for a day.
• How do you see SOA in 5 years from now? Please take both the “local” (LT) perspective and global one.
• What are the pros and cons of “totally online” computing? Think of the Yahoo Pipes – you basically depend totally on the connections.
• How would you use Web 2.0 in a commercial projects? Web 2.0 is, in short: social computing + data mash-ups + rich interfaces.
• How would have you organized this course if given a chance? Please think both from the contents and the form perspective.
• What the lecturers were good at?
• What the lecturers did wrong?
• What topics would you want to include into the remaining sessions?

Please address these points and feel free to add anything you would think YOUR PEERS (and the lecturers) would enjoy reading. The last point is not only for the final “essay” but also for now – we got some seminars ahead of us, as you know. Do shape them!

So you need to register at www.edublogs.org and then ask me, Justinas or Jelena to enable you at soamif.edublofs.org as Authors.

I hope this makes sense, your comments are welcome.

My pleasure was to meet you all earlier today, have a nice Sunday and Easter holidays thereafter.

Time flies by and the 31st of March will not only end the first month of spring, but it will comfortably take us to the 3/4 mark of the entire course… So, is this course half-empty or half-full, this is the question… Well, it depends how you look at it and what benefits you want to reap from all this activity.

Here is what I thought would make sense to do on Saturday:

• Firstly, we listen (and I am sure will jump into discussion) what Jelena has to say about SOA in GIS world. I had a chance to get an early preview of the presentation and it is interesting, I think. This sounds like an incentive to come and join us early
• Secondly, I think the previous lecture naturally set up the scene for the talk I planned anyway – “Advanced Web services Architecture”. I think we’ve had enough to realise that SOA/WS is not a toy anymore, it enters corporate IT systems world, therefore it needs corporate muscle. This is what advanced WS architecture is all about. On the other hand we have discussed some architectural/technical stuff, this complements the vision yet we need to tie the loose ends to have the complete picture. So I will try to explain the architecture. I am sure this will turn into a good discussion too.
• Well, I think I better don’t plan anything major in addition to that. There will always be impromptu topics and that’s great, that’s why we value, encourage and stop just short of begging for your active participation

See you all there!

P.S. I almost forgot – we will need to meet in the room #302, as there will be ~450 kids (moksleiviai jaunieji matematikai ) in the house on Saturday. I am not sure they are ripe enough for SOA talks quite yet

Let me briefly summarize the last lecture, its outcome and impact.

• Discussion about the benefits of these Saturday talks

There was a question up in the air among the students (and the lecturers) about the benefits of this activity, i.e. it was considered cool and interesting, yet the clear benefits remained to be seen. So we decided to talk about the benefits, asked ourselves questions and tried to make a list of potential benefits. The main beneficiaries (students) came up with the following list of “goodies”:

• General understanding of the SOA concepts
• Information about particular technologies
• Starting point to learn more in a different style
• A possibility to hear about the experience of others
• An example of innovative approach and style in teaching
• A chance to learn presenting own ideas

• And here is the one which literally sent us with Giedrius through the roof with joy: “During the lectures I realised what my company expects from me as an employee.” Amazing. This makes it worth doing.

We also added a few other benefits to the list:

• A possibility of professional networking among the students based on some different perspective than usual
• Rethinking of the purpose of studies, readiness to influence the studies providing constructive feedback

The list is far from complete. It is up to everyone to suggest things. You can do what you think is good – try running a lecture if you feel like doing so, make a presentation, initiate a discussion, suggest topic… Kurkime ateiti drauge (let’s create the future together), as they say in this EU BPD programme Be free. Think. This is YOUR course, your time and your opportunity.

• Aspects of Web services composition/conversations in business collaborations

We had a presentation made by Justinas, he was sharing his thoughts about business collaborations in SOA environment, explained different options of services composition and interaction. The presentation turned into a lively discussion and we concluded that the most important thing is to have a good business case (and model) for service interactions to be effective.

• Practical view of SOA

This “business models” come first point of view was confirmed by Albertas Šermokas, who gave us a very interesting talk about real (and quite big) IT integration projects in Lithuania. Albertas illustrated his point of view explaining the approach taken to integrate the operations of automotive insurance providers by creating an “independent insurance information centre/bureau” (”Lietuvos Respublikos transporto priemonių draudikų biuras“), which helps the individual insurers to exchange important information in ad-hoc on-demand fashion. This approach, among other things, allows the insurers to minimize their risks, prevents ill-behaved drivers from hopping from one insurance provider to another without penalty.

Albertas explained the principles and the process of change from the old “single database” approach to the SOA-like conceptual model where the bureau defined certain service interfaces for the participants to be implemented, which allowed to achieve uniformity and interoperability for this kind of information exchange. He also touched some architectural decisions, such the need for asynchronous communications, etc.

This example clearly showed that “SOA in action” is here next to us in LT market and we need to be ready to apply the best concepts in practice. As Sintagma says: “Žinias paverčiame sprendimais” (”Turning knowledge into solutions”).

• SOA for GIS

We decided to roll Jelena’s talk about SOA solutions in GIS world into the next Saturday, to give her proper chunk of time and attention.

I just realised that this post became very long… so I will write next one about the plans for next time.

As planned, I was privileged to attend (thank you, Gintaras!) the match between Lithuania and France in Kaunas.

It was quite good display, I must say, for the given circumstances and the Lithuanians richly deserved a draw…

However, Anelka was the man, he kept himself quite busy attacking in the first half:

and in the second half he scored…

Somehow I have managed to capture the goal despite not being one of these guys

Allez les Bleus!

Just to confirm: all the expected speakers – Albertas, Jelena & Justinas confirmed they will be talking/presenting this Saturday.

So, tune your mind into the integration (enterprise, business, GIS…) stuff and see you there!

P.S. A few links:

• For SOA to work we need an Open SOA
• REST Eye for the SOA, by Steve Vinoski
• Enterprise Integration Patterns, by Gregor Hohpe
• Putting the `A’ back into SOA with WS-CDL, by Steve Ross-Talbot
• SOA & GIS stuff:

• Corporate
• Academia

And watch this if you have not yet – thanks, Justinas!

Greetings to All.

As our series start rolling into the second half, we expect several new speakers on Saturday, 24th of March:

• I hope that Albertas Šermokas, COO of Sintagma will join us and share his managerial insight about the role of SOA in Sintagma’s current and prospective projects. Other related topics are welcome.
• Justinas Bedžinskas tentatively promised to give a talk about service conversations, choreographed peer-to-peer interactions – issues and potential solutions in this field. Justinas’ work becomes highly relevant to the solutions we plan to build into the R4eGov framework, namely InterOperability (IOP) Gateways.
• Last but not least, there is a word from Jelena Isačenkova that she would like to share with us her thoughts on the SOA and GIS synergy. This becomes one hot topic as all these data mash-ups enriched with geographical information are mushrooming all over the place and we g&g (google and gis) before we think… I will not steal the show by putting more links here. I was tempted, though. I am sure that the GIS topic will connect with some of Albertas’ interests/expertise as well.

This will allow us with Giedrius to listen more and talk less, which is good.

See you there. The forecast promises sunny skies for Saturday, this leads into temptation, I know

The sunny skies may help les bleus, though. Allez les bleus! I will attend the match in Kaunas, and you?

Coupe de boule, anyone ? The “lyrics” (also in English) is here.

During our todays’ lecture we were talking not only about SOA (as we supposed to  ), but Adomas and Giedrius told us about the expirience in project managment and also about a good CV and the right interview. I remebered that recently I have read some stuff on Joel Spolsky website about interviewing. This man has his own IT company – Fog CreekSoftware and periodicaly writes articles based on his work experience. So, he has wrote one about an interviewing It’s quest an old one, but still it is a great example with tips and hints. Also, he wrote a newer one.

Another good thing about his site is that here you may find even a list of job offers and a Joel Test consisting of twelve questions to measure the quality of a software team.