From SOA buzzwords to WS-Confusion and back to Earth

“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 .

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Work on our project was completed before schedule in 7th of May as I remember (we still had 7 days left – good for us). One of the requirements was to package a web service like product, like we would be selling it on www.strikeiron.com. So you can check it out on our project homepage. Our project was presented by Justas J. even three times, so it would be really really boring to write and repeat the same stuff again . But I will repeat it again from requirements viewpoint.

• Business vision – The slogan of www.strikeiron.com is “data as a service”. To put in a nutsheel, there is a need to create an aggregator and user interface to provide most common Lithuanian investment funds values in one place.
• Conceptual and technical architecture – high level architecture diagram.
• Implementation – One of our goals was to implement different parsers and services with different tools.
• Overall marketable value – look and feel and description.

To sum up there was a great pleasure working with guys such as Darius, Justas and Vaidas (in alphabetic order ) and creating something valuable. Viva la Tigers. Viva la SOA!

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

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.

One more topic about SOA, this time in lithuanian at Elektronika.lt news portal: “Į paslaugas orientuotai it architektūrai – vis daugiau dėmesio“

Check out slide #29

If we want to be a bit more complete formal giving a no-no advice, here is a link to ta “SOA anti patterns” article.

Here is one more “anti” article written in way less-formal style, and here is one on some specific issue.

I’ve just found an article about SOA: “How to succeed with SOA”…

Kind regards to you all from sunny Riviera Thanks for coming last Saturday and also contributing to our site. I am looking very much forward to see you in 3-4 days again. I am really keen to feel a proper winter again

Before trying to write something more meaningful I will share a couple of links with you – Google API was already described in some books back in 2004, since then more books appeared describing how to do SOA using Google, Amazon, Fedex etc. This is quite convenient when you have standards in place for such things, I remember exploring Trilogy-UPS integration without standards in 2000, it was quite a pain. Now UPS uses standards as well and it shows – this mash-up is a nice one.

So, please check out more – Googe Code site feels like a sip straight from a fire hose Use your imagination ladies & gents!

Maybe this technology arsenal and some creative thinking will inspire to take a path less travelled I am thankful to Justinas for this link, he will cross-blog it. Guy Kawasaki is a charismatic speaker indeed.

Lecturer Adomas mentioned us a cool web services marketplace StrikeIron. Well, I googled for a minute and found another five marketplaces. They are not so good as StrikeIron, but worth a look. Some of them are more web services catalogs then marketplaces.

• xmethods
• XWeServices
• eSigma
• webserviceslist
• RemoteMethods

Of course this is not true , but the quote is valid. WS-Confusion concept in this blog’s description is for a reason. Everybody knows facts about Chuck Norris. Accidently I discovered SOA facts and some of them are pretty funny. I think that this course should deny mentioned SOA facts, eliminate fog of war not going into technical details. As lecturers have lots of industry experience, I think it would be interesting to tell us (students) about pitfalls you encountered in SOA road. For example how to sell SOA to CEO’s, clients, partners. Though this is marketing, but this isn’t offtopic? . Right?