From SOA buzzwords to WS-Confusion and back to Earth

better later than never eh? (had some problems with login name added to publishers group or something like that)

So what was the entire course about?!

Well it was about soa, where it lives, why it lives, how it lives and is born. Also how could it be used, and what makes soa actually service oriented not just simple application.

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

Insight on what is there available for use and for free. How certain elements could enrich a website with as much hassle as possible, this was basically the main thing. Also some insight on technologies and companies behind the scenes.

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

At the moment none, but in the near future a website project is on the horizon so some web services might just be used in there

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

Many already available and implemented solutions for upcoming works and tasks to fulfill.

How do you see SOA in 5 years from now?

I think eventually such an idea as soa will be de facto and more or less all software will have similar qualities and properties, and will be available for use in one way or another on some more or less generalized interface.

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

Pros: easy maintenance, administration, access control, bug fixes and developement, also easy to use on distributed environment, using widespread technologies.

Cons: security, network bandwidth requirements, network instability issues and possible problems.

How would you use Web 2.0 in commercial projects?

For added services, marketing, rich content, for maintaining a user with new features and new ideas.

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

I would have gone pretty much same way it was presented. One thing that was in one way bad (looking at academic perspective), but good in another (more common sense way) was some minor fluctuations on the subject of the lectures, as sometimes they got a bit out of hand and went too wide, thus giving common sense on the problem, but avoiding specific situations and probable solutions.

What the lecturers did wrong?

Long lectures on weekends… irregular evaluation system, very complex and probably uncalled for evaluation results, as community (in this case students) are rude in the way that they tend not to forgive mistakes and sometimes one mark given by the students can hamper the overall result witch is not that bad afterall…

What the lecturers were good at?

Interaction with students, subject selection and presentation. Also many examples and situations from real life described and explained, and this is where true experience lies and what many of us still lack.

Karolis Pociūnas

Google just released a web-based mashup creator and hosting environment. The editor accepts HTML, CSS, and Google-specific XML tags. These tags provide access to google feeds such as the Google Calendar and Base.
It is in limited testing at the moment, but still… can find it here: http://googlemashups.com/

The short answer for SOA security problems is that you need to buy or develop a security solution for your SOA. OR you can do it self www.developer.com/design/article.php/10925_3607471_1

Today, the last day of SOA course, all 5 teams have presented their work results. Here you can find the list of team wikis and projects demos:

1. elbO - weather & route plan mashup
2. Degalai - Fuel prices
3. calsbergGroup – Odontologijos klinikos
4. Panteros – TravelLit
5. Tigrai – LIFI

After watching all these presentations and User interfaces for WS, the idea of creating a big SOA course project’s mashup has visited me and I would like to share it with you:

One summer day brother Petras realizes that it would be great to visit a dentist. He starts to google for better prices and googles a web site with all dentists of Lithuania aggregated to one site. He searches the site and finds dentist he wants to visit, but it is located in Zemaityja, Plunge and brother Petras in Druskininkai. Quite a problem to get there…

However, this newly discovered site offers him a travel route displayed on the map next to the dentist contacts. Together with the map he finds the list of directions how to get from Druskininkai to Plunge and gasolines that are situated on this route with a list of fuel prices. Moreover, on the bottom of these directions there is a list of Zemaityja most visitable places with pictures. The weather cast in the right corner of the site informs about sunny weather for the next three days – just in time to visit a dentist! “What a great idea!”, – thinks brother Petras and is ready to book!.. However, he is not just simple man… He is a clever guy and invests his money into Lithuanian funds. He wants to be always on the top of the news and to track current stock prices – no problem! He will get that through the service in the left corner of the site.

The idea is very fresh and it is hard to imagine such mega-mix in real life, but I think it is a beginning of “mashup thinking style”.

 OK, let’s go back to our evaluations, here they are:

Quite unexpected results – “Fuel price” project was really very popular among students. Well presented  practical idea for daily life

However, the main beauty of this course IMHO is what we’ve got for ourselves by attending these saturdays together with the course mates, Adomas Svirskas and Giedrius Zlatkus. Thanks to you all for such great life experience!

As I heard from Giedrius, tomorrow you will have a review session. I want to remind the principles and criteria we agreed upon. There are few more things, which will matter:

• Relevance of the solution area – i.e. how practical this can be and how many businesses/individuals would benefit
• Completeness of project work – to what extent you were able to complete what you chose to undertake?
• Tools & techniques – how modern they are?
• Has your work resulted in a new reusable WS?
• How well the solution is documented?
• How well it is presented?

Once again, I regret chosing to attend Monaco GP (Saturday only) instead of being with you tomorrow Giedrius will evaluate you in a proper, structured and fair manner, I am sure.

Mashups: The next major new software development model?

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

Mozy is not as cool as Amazon S3, however it allows you to store 2GB free of charge and have some peace of mind.

I have just tried it today.

Quite impressive article I found in Business 2.0 magazine -  The Next Net 25. Not the ‘fresh’ one, but… Joost makes it more fresh and the Hivemind fulfills it. So, are we prepared for a Life 2.0? Cause it’s getting closer then we can image sometimes.

Thanks for a Joost invitation.

That may be offtopic but I really enjoyed this blog post by Mads Kristensen about simplicity and complexity. Author does make some really good points, why we should avoid complex solutions and even complex problems can be solved with simple solutions. Author believes that when you are thinking about complex solution, that means that you really don’t understand the problem. “If you don’t understand the problem you are trying to solve, then you probably cannot solve it. It would be like saying “my car makes a strange sound, I think I will remove the engine to see if it makes it stop”.”

We do have web 2.0, education 2.0 is comming. And that’s not all, have a look at supermarket 2.0. Thank you, Aivaras!

Fuff, at last I managed to compile some page resource based on last Saturday’s lecture, there I do re-explane concepts and standards I have presented about business process integration in SOA context. Comments and some bashing are welcome, so maybe I would improve that page on demand. Also everybody is welcome to update and fix it if I forgot to write about something important.

We were delighted to have Albertas Šermokas, COO of Sintagma on Saturday for a good hour and to listen for his interesting talk about SOA in action. Albertas unveiled business and architectural approaches and some details of big Lithuanian IT integration projects. He explained that SOA is “of this much importance” (well, almost a yard…):

Albertas also elaborated on the business benefits of proper SOA application – they are “this tangible” (you can almost feel them :

Therefore we say “this huge” thank you to Albertas and make a note for ourselves: let’s try to learn more about that SOA.

I have almost forgot one very shameful incident, which happened at the match on Saturday. Well, the match was enjoyable, so it was a small wonder I was cherishing the nice moments mostly during the weekend, however having finally checked all the pictures I took and having read this, I remembered that a significant number of complete idiots (morons, dolts, narrow-minded sh*tkickers and a$$holes, … you name them) were present as well. I have got a deeply insulting word “kaktakrušys” in my verbal weaponry (of quite an extensive range, according to some), so I really think the guys can be referred to as “kaktakru…”.

You think I am exaggerating? Well, see yourself what the suckers did:

Lithuanian zealots seem to pick the worst habits very quickly. Shame. To all my friends of color: we have idiots too, like everywhere.

The Lithuanian Football Federation promptly considered this sh*t being a crime and indicated that they will seek police assistance to identify those involved in this incident.

This small country (my beloved homeland, of course) really sucks at times when the worst of the worst do like that or, let’s say, bring some guys like Tampaxas/Agurkichas (the locals know these nicks) to power through free election… Free election powered by enslaved minds is like vodka + beer = king-size hangover…. Sorry for politics.

Posts to the course/SOA topic will follow.

Last Saturday, when lecturer Adomas told us about his and his team’s problems trying to create user interfaces with Java, I remembered reading this article by Bruce Eckel. The author of Thinking in Java analyzes reasons behind Java’s failure as the main technology for Rich Internet Applications. In the first half of the article, that is. In the second he praises Flash/Flex as the Next Big Thing in GUI development. Given the fact that Bruce is “in the process of working out a consulting contract with Adobe, to help them teach people about Flex” (quote from the article), we can understand the guy

As promised – some info about The acquisition of Skype by eBAY. Obviously, not everything was a cake walk for them..

Unfortunately, some flu/virus prevented me from coming. Same happened to Albertas Sermokas, who had tentatively promised to join us today for a chat.

I am sorry, things do happen…

Adomas mentioned and posted a link to a Guy Kawasaki’s video, where he talks about how should you start your business, what pitfalls awaits you and on what things you should focus. Presentation is quite long, but it’s worth it . Guy Kawasaki started in jewellery business and worked for Apple twice as a (chef) evangelist. He is the guy who brought the concept of evangelist to IT business. Wikipedia defines evangelist as a person who “promotes the use of a particular product or technology through talks, articles, blogging, user demonstrations, recorded demonstrations, or the creation of sample projects“. Well, the definition is clear, but personally I don’t like it. I would rather agree with Jeff Atwood who defines term evangelist as a person who shares his excitement and enthusiasm with other people in an effective way. Or to put in short, evangelist is a sales person who shows others what cool stuff their company is doing.

Indeed, precisely 20 years ago we were using this wonderful piece of soviet computer machinery ДВК-2 as THE tool here at VU MAF (Giedrius was PDP-11 guru at that time ). Before we could use it, we needed to master certain tools – flooppy disks, command-line word processor etc.

Similarly, before we can learn about SOA, WS and Web 2.0 properly, we need to master other tools – blogs, Wiki etc. Every generation has its tools

We certainly support and will try to practice this point of view Here is a link to the speaker’s blog. And here is a homework – to prepare to lead a discussion about Education 2.0. Any volunteers? This initiative seems to be quite interesting.