From SOA buzzwords to WS-Confusion and back to Earth

I still remember how my idea of a post about Yahoo! Pipes was stolen However, I’m not going to let it happen this time.

Of course, it was just a matter of time when does Microsoft offer something for easy creation of mash-ups. And here it is, Microsoft Popfly. It’s based on Microsoft’s own substitute to Flash, the Silverlight technology. The service is still in invitations-only alpha testing phase, so I wasn’t able to play with it myself (I sent a request for invitation, though), but there are some reviews and demos. Looks nice, and it’s 3D!

Makes me wonder what will Google’s response look like…

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

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.

Don’t know if it hasn’t been already posted, but here Alex Iskold writes about “When web sites become web services“.

Last saturday “The SOA tigers” team presented an architecture of their little project with investment funds. So we are planning to write some web services and parsers to aggregate that data. One of the web services, call it converter service, which I am responsible of, will be using web services published by Lietuvos Bankas. And I decided to share my poor knowledge how to easily write a really simple proxy (or broker) web service using LB services. (more…)

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.

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.

If someone thinks that only Google do (do they?) cool things exposing SOA-like stuff via nice Web 2.0 widgets, this is not quite so. Look at this invention of Yahoo – Yahoo Pipes. As they say, “look ma, no coding, just dragging and dropping!”

This is really interesting stuff – allows to play with programmable web without programming.

Really, the stuff we can create with these Yahoo Pipes on the Web is limited only to our imagination… Well, maybe constrained by available feeds/services. The Yahoo Pipes drew some attention right away, of course…

A meaningful example – eBay price watch.

This Pipes editor reminds me Tibco Integration Manager, an expensive integration product, which we were using at Kiala. The product sucked, but somehow used to do the job. The world has changed – some simple version of such monster is available via WWW for free to play, and Tibco ships AJAX interface…

Here is how a cool meets a scalable We all want her to be smart, beautiful and maybe rich

OK, gotta pack and catch my flight in a few hours. Kind of “dushas, iklotas, oro uosto parkingas, Lufthansa ” weekly routine
See you on Saturday.

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?