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

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

I was always interested in computer networks, so naturally I chose this course over the others.

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

Forgetting the fact, that the name of this course was „Advanced computer networks“, I believe this course was as compelling as possible. Though whole concept of SOA was not new for me, it was very interesting to get to know how people think about it, how they use it and, more interestingly, how would they use it in different situation, create mash-ups, etc. This course really helped me widen my perspective on the current evolution of the whole WEB 2.0 – from both user and system developer point of views.

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

I can’t name an immediate benefit from this course, as my work does not involve intense usage of web services.

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

The whole concept of SOA is helpful by itself As for me, I believe there are a lot of fields where SOA should be used; the developers are yet to understand the importance of this. We’ve seen WEB 2.0 going up – I am sure this trend will only increase.

How do you see SOA in 5 years from now?

I would certainly agree with most of members of this course in saying that the SOA will get a lot more credit that now. As for the trends, some monopolization could be possible – monopolization in the sense of de facto standards will arise (Google Maps vs. Microsoft Live Maps). I also think, that mash-up will become a lot more common than now.

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

Pros for this would be the ease of access to your personal /public information – we can now easily store information on Google spreadsheets (and etc.) – I wonder where this will lead.

As for a con (hm..?) – totally online computing will have to iterate through more than double than 15 years of life in order to fully satisfy our requirements.

From a personal over-the-top paranoid point of view – not going to happen

How would you use Web 2.0 in commercial projects?

I can’t answer this question, since it would depend on the project itself. As for a basis, I would really try to implement web-services, if there was any actual benefit to anyone else.

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

The course was great, since we had lots and lots of interesting discussions, people from other universities, the projects were also interesting to also make and judge

What the lecturers did wrong? What the lecturers were good at?

The main problem with this course was timing – to sit in a classroom on Saturday, for (most commonly) 6 hours is not what we anticipated.

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

To be honest, I‘ve chosen this course, because I expected to have more leisure time. I‘ve attended similar course of Adomas a few years ago, and this course seemed to be the same. But I was wrong, and don‘t regret „lost“ saturdays.

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

This course helped to realise what‘s happening in the internet (world?) today. Now I understand what is web 2.0 and what benefits it gives. Also this course helped to reveal my goals, because lecturers talked not only about SOA related things. I gained useful information about project (and life) management, though it was superficial.

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

I work in data warehouse and data analysis field, and currently my job is not related with SOA.

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

Data warehouses are essential part of enterprises and „SOA broadens the range of impact that the data warehouse has on the enterprise.“ So to understand the big picture of enterprise information systems is very useful.

How do you see SOA in 5 years from now?

World is changing all the time. And I think it is changing to service oriented direction, so SOA principles will be used more extensively in the future.

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

Pros: optimized hardware and software resources, faster application development.
Cons: reliability and security of services.

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

I would concentrate more on main subject – SOA, to understand it at deeper level.
The form of lectures I liked, and wouldn‘t change. Of course it would be better to give practical tasks in the beginning of course.

What the lecturers did wrong?

Rules of assessment should be determined at the beginning of course.

What the lecturers were good at?

Lecturers were good at communicating with students and analyzing their needs. I liked how they were showing real world examples. The idea of inviting guest, SOA professionals, was brilliant. I didn‘t have anything similar courses before.

To sum all this up, it was one of most valuable and enjoyable course I have ever had.

Remigijus Kilas

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

To tell the truth, I hadn’t known what SOA stood for before I enrolled on this course. I knew there were web services and I knew how to use them, I saw all the hype with blogging, RSS feeds, myspaces and youtubes, but I could never imagine that this whole trend could be standartized into some form of architectural style. So it was great for me to see the big picture. I got some new potential business ideas for future, or to put it differently, I now have a different way of trying to come up with a business idea, thanks to SOA. Still, the name of the course (Computer Networks) is totally misleading and should definitely be changed in the future.

Presentations of our foreign guests were good, but somewhat misplaced. I mean, Johnatan came at the end of the semester and started with a presentation of the basics “what is SOA”. I was hoping for some deeper analysis of questionable aspects of SOA, which he did later, but I just feel that some time could be saved by cutting the basics. And it all ended too late, so we were to tired to start a discussion, which I would have liked a lot. Presentation by Mrs Svirskiene had some fresh and interesting thoughts, a strong practical point of view, but in my opinion lacked cohesion. I didn’t really understand the goal of the presentation, a summary of some kind would also be good, because it made some of the teams make false conclusions, such as that WSDL is enough to document a web service.

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

As I said, I have a new way of looking at potential business ideas. Business no longer has to be expensive to start up with lots of coding, cutting edge technologies, etc. The most important thing is a killer idea whilst the functionality is most probably already available and could be reused – the Internet is full of it, free or not. In my current job, there’s not much direct benefit from the course. Possibly with the exception of the fact that I now know what web services are really meant for and when it is better to use remoting, RPC and other faster technologies.

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

We are developing a document management system in our company and we are going to use an Estonian webservice to implement digital signature via mobile phones. The number of webservices is inevitably going to grow in the future, so I believe, there are some more integration projects to come. It’s great to see how immense functionality can be used with practically no effort.

How do you see SOA in 5 years from now?

I hope to see a trend towards standartizing the available services. Really good ones should become popular and be really widely used while poorly documented and unreliable ones should lose popularity. So it’s a certain vision of monopolization. Well, unavoidably, more and more services will be appearing. I especially hope that Lithuanian developers will understand this trend too and will create services to leverage banking data, governmental services, mapping data, traffic data, etc. I have many ideas that could be implemented if only these services were available in our country.

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

Pros: wide availability of functionality, immense computing power without buying expensive hardware, shorter and cheaper projects, easier deployment and maintainability.

Cons: loose couping, lack of standartization, possibility of incompatibility after modification, connectivity is still not ubiquitous or sufficiently fast. If you’re lacking a certain small piece of functionality in a service, it can be incredibly difficult to get it. If some of the services you are using go down, you’re going to smell some big trouble.

How would you use Web 2.0 in commercial projects?

I personally hate blogs and myspace. I mean the idea that you can have your own website with a picture gallery and a journal is older than life. What occurs to me is that someone took an old idea, made it more accessible (so that even my grandmother could create her web space) and gained enormous popularity. So in my commercial projects, you will not see wikis, blogs, flickr photos or embedded youtube videos. I just might be aiming to a different public. But I would definitely take the whole trend into account and I’d gladly use professionally made services, such as Microsoft MapPoint and would allow my users to publish their comments and content, if only this was appropriate.

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

I’ll talk about both questions in one go, because they are really related. Well, first of all  the course should have a different name (not computer networks). Secondly – saturdays is a bad choice. I’m a working person and I can put up with the idea of wasted evenings during the weekdays. But weekend – is a sacred thing. Some of us plan to leave city and like to do that on Fridays. Others have extracurricular activities that have been undertaken for years are scheduled for weekends. So I really appreciate that one of the lecturers had to fly from France, but it was a sacrifice both for him and for us. I sincerely believe, there can be a solution when no one has to sacrifice their time. I mean if someone (especially with such a bright mind as Adomas) chooses to leave the country and work abroad, it’s a pity for everyone here. But as someone said, there are no irreplaceable people. Even if really Saturdays were the only option, giving TWO points for attendance is inadequate. But thankfully, there were ways to make up for the lost points.

As most of others said, the lectures were too long. Not in the sense of giving too much information in one go, but giving too little information in too much time. I would shorten everything to 2-3 hours with a 15 min. break.

Another thing – lack of preparation. Spontaneous talking was put as an advantage of this course and as modern way of having lectures, but I understand spontaneous talking a bit differently. Firstly, each lecture should have at least a vision if not a plan. The visions of all lectures should come together into a big and cohesive picture. A vision does not have to be too concrete (if avoiding traditional teaching methodology is sought) but it must exist. The lecturer should prepare at home to talk about different topics and then let the audience guide the presentation. The way things seemed to be happening now was that at times, a lecturer would start talking according to a spontaneous topic that he has some general knowledge about, but he wasn’t preparing to talk about. Take for example project management. We (at least former Software engineering students) had several good and exhaustive courses on project management. And we really had them structured, full of real world examples and it really came together into a big picture. During one of SOA sessions, one of the lecturers started talking spontaneously about project management, grasped the surface of topic A, barely touched topic B, etc. The result was that a lot of time was consumed, more questions raised than answered and not many ideas that ware presented could be reused, because everything was too superficial. What could have been done in this situation – the lecturer could prepare before the lecture and think about “how project management in other projects is different from SOA projects? How small team projects are unique? Which aspects of project management would I like to present to the students of this course? What knowledge do they currently possess? How does it all fit into the series of our sessions?”

I really liked it when lecturers gave plenty of real world examples. The ability to start a discussion in a group is also very valuable. I liked that we were told about things that are happening and that are being created today, not about some old fashioned 70s approaches that the lecturer once learned when still studying. It’s just perfect that communication media for this course (this blog with all the add-ins) was web 2.0 based. Kind of “practice what you preach” approach. And the team projects were pretty interesting – something completely different from what I was used to. Not another C or Java application, implementing pizza delivery or library software that no one would ever use. Still I wouldn’t use wiki as a space for my project documentation, but I have at least tried and now have an opinion.

In any case, both of the lecturers did a great job. It took quite some time and devotion to make this whole course happen. And you can’t expect to get everything right the first time. I believe that next year it will be much better. Thank you guys and may SOA be all over you.

Ugnius Keturka

I’ve got some valuable knowledge about SOA principles and technologies and gained a bit of experience in creating web-services.

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

None. I’m not using SOA today and I don’t plan to use it in near future for my current projects do not involve web access in any form.

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.

I am the system architect (just because nobody else is involved in software analysis and design) of my company. But the specific features of my projects require high processing speed on small amounts of data and high security level. Therefore SOA would give no benefit here.

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

It’s quite hard to predict anything in information technologies, but in my opinion, SOA will continue spreading, both in Lithuania and world-wide.

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

The main advantage is the ability to create a distributed system easily. The main disadvantages are data transfer speed and security.

How would you use Web 2.0 in a commercial project? Web 2.0 is, in short: social computing + data mash-ups + rich interfaces.

It depends on project requirements and specific features only.

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

A bit more technical details and no lectures on Saturdays.

Sincerely,

Sergej Christoforov.

This course stimulated to take more interest in innovations and to follow the latest news. Also I began to treat various things related to career more critically. What is more, I am very interested in Project management and during the course i heard many interesting things about that.

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

It is hard to say yet. I haven‘t worked with a project where WS was used. I think the real benefit I will gain later. Also my attitude towards lithuanian companies and employers has changed.

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

While working I see many situations in which SOA would be very useful. Unfortunatelly, architectural concepts do not depent on me…

How do you see SOA in 5 years from now?

It is very hard to say, because everything changes so fast nowadays. It is practically impossible to guess what will be in two years from now, nt talking of 5 years. But I have no doubts that SOA will be very common between many organizations.

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

Pros: there is plenty of information and it is quickly reachable.

How would you use Web 2.0 in commercial projects?

This question is very abstract. It depends on many things. I can not answer this question specifically.

How would have you organized this course if given a chance? Please think both

from the contents and the form perspective.

I would pay more attention to SOA‘s technical aspect, news, future. It like that you offer true-life examples. Also I would offer that lectures were taken in english.

What the lecturers did wrong?What the lecturers were good at?

Good:

The other people were invited to do reports. Lecturers really managed to engage students. Lecturers shared their own ewperience.

Wrong:

Lectures were too long.

On Saturdays.

I have read the short summary of this course in the faculty (when picking up the subject to participate during this spring session) and I really liked it! I thought it would be great to know something new – and I didn’t miss. That’s why I’m here

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

First of all, I had a great time during the classes. It was really not the problem to wake up at 8 AM on Saturday and spend the most part of the day in the lecture because I knew it is going to be interesting. Secondly, I must mention experience. Giedrius and Adomas shared their experience about interesting projects, we could discuss it. It was interesting to listen to those lecturers no matter what they were talking about But the main value of this course is … that I have never heard about SOA before! Yes, it’s true So it was a perfect time to get feet wet, like Adomas says. Finally, I have had a chance not only to hear about SOA, but also to participate in the project which we gladly made.

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

Nowadays it is a must to know about SOA (I mean for IT people). It is widely used “thing” and why it couldn’t be adopted in my job? So attending these lectures widely spread my view and now I’m able to think differently. That’s why nowadays I’m using SOA not only in my job, but also in my free time (i.e. I’m converting created web pages to web services)

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.

As I have mentioned before, I’m trying to adopt it in my job. I work in a company that creates a software (basically accounting) and we have various projects. And I could say that this course helped me to suggest the part of architecture in one of our projects: we will use SOA Sometimes SOA doesn’t fit, but knowing SOA is an alternative way to create architecture.

About being the chief systems architect… I definitely would try to use SOA. But sometimes a “try” isn’t enough. You have to know the most part of architecture styles in order to combine them. You have to know pros and cons. And only then it is time to choose. It’s hard to say what I would suggest. But I repeat: SOA is the way.

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

It’s interesting question. Of course, it will spread. How far? Hard to say. Perspectives in LT are not so proud as they could be. But this course have struck the spark The global perspective is really better. No doubts, SOA will expand.

What are the pros and cons of “totally online” computing?The main thing – it greatly saves time. The other thing – there are so much done via web services that you only have to look for, not to create the needed one. But this is the same – it saves time. And sometimes – money.

The biggest disadvantage I see here is security. Also I could mention the speed (arguable) and the cost.

How would you use Web 2.0 in a commercial projects? Web 2.0 is, in short: social computing + data mash-ups + rich interfaces.

I see it the way Jonathan showed us: combine some great things together (Youtube, Flickr and so on) and present a valuable and informative mash-up via rich interface. But, of course, it depends on the project.

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

You guys did a great job. And this is the way for us to learn, not to teach you. But if I were you, I would include more practical things in the course (creating simple web services – doing some practical one-two-week tasks). Also I would greatly try to involve students to discussions (you also did that). But it is not easy to do because sometimes we need to be enthused, and sometimes we need a kick to the ass

But I must say, that this course was very interesting and informative. I liked the way you look to students: they are your friends, not the enemies you have to kill them during exam. I liked the discussions. Especially I liked those unrehearsed classes when Giedrius talked about the “purpose of life”. I think, this is the way to go: try to force student to think himself by not telling the whole sentence/mind whatever.

The other good part of the course is that we had guests. This was very pleasurable especially knowing that these people are not ordinary. I really thank you for this and for those people who made very interesting appearance.

One more thing that impressed me a lot was our lecturer Adomas. I’m really rapt! Fly from France to Lithuania almost every week for only one lesson (on Saturday) – it’s amazing. I really appreciate it.

Despite the fact that we were not told all the rules of the game in the beginning of the course, I could easily say that this was the best course I have ever attended in Vilnius University. Thanks for our lecturers Giedrius Zlatkus and Adomas Svirskas!

Antanas Vipartas

 Bad things…

During lectures we‘ve spoken about SOA, we‘ve spoken about Web Services – good! I think now we all know what it is and how to apply it – very good!

However, the main thing I‘ve missed in this course is SOA projection to business processes. We had Justinas Bedžinskas talk on business collaborations in SOA environment, but we spoke not enough about business processes and their management ways using SOA. I think students were confused about this topic and later forgot it at all, redirecting the focus on the business idea/vision. I think a question “where is the connection between business processes and SOA” was unrevealed at the level it could and should be. No conception of BPM + SOA = the key-concept that makes IT world crazy today!

The answers were not very far… “BPM and SOA: Where does one end and other begin?” and “If all my modules communicate via Web Services, all I have is a bunch of Web Services! I do not yet have SOA!” – these citations from “Software system architecture” course, prepared by Donatas Čiukšys, made me think of SOA as not only (Web) Services, as we were mostly speaking at SOA lectures. D. Čiukšys started his lecture on SOA speaking about BPM and only then about SOA. This quite simple diagram explains why:

This lecture gave another point of view for SOA implementation and was very helpful in understanding the real power and worthiness of SOA.

Good things…

Project management – priceless thing about the elements of project management in SOA course is that first of all its’ concepts are applicable in various fields and even in personal life. A table for assigning project’s priority is a very good example. Secondly, a projection of professional experience into daily life things is an art and shows deep understanding of the topic (remember Raudys lectures). I mean, learning from a professional, who has practical experience background – what could be better! A little bit off topic? But what did we get at university in 4 years?! If I can get much more at SOA lectures – my duty is to take it and apply in practice.

Moreover, Giedrius has experience in business process management, which is the beginning of SOA. Here was the right mashup during lectures

Motivation problems – today this issue is critical for youth and many people pay money for it! And will do in the next several years for sure. Now we get it for free or for 500Lt.

We were taught to think, think wider then usually at university.

We were taught to look at things from different perspectives (thanks to Giedrius, I haven’t seen GIS from so many different points of view as he has presented).

We were inspired to create something new, to understand by ourselves the real value of created product and to be able to deliver it to other people.

What would I change?

I would rename the course something like „E-Commerce and SOA“, that it could better reflect what we were doing during the course and while implementing our projects. I don‘t think it would be good idea to make the course more theoretical from SOA perspective.

I would rather leave as it is or even represent it from more commercial perspective, because then the term like „added value“ or “value creation” becomes obvious for everyone and the connection between business and IT projects is understood by developers/IT specialists.

““Value creation” refers to an increase in the business benefit to the client. In the context of this Practice, value creation is more than adding value through the service delivery already being provided. It includes the act of identifying opportunities of greater business value for the client, including innovative business arrangements or technologies.”, – eSCM-SP relationship management.

In real life understanding these concepts can be critical. As J. Briggs said that we need not coders, but developers with ideas. Where are the ideas? Now I have very helpful reference to this question – TED‘s talk, where the tips are given on how to get ideas – listen, observe, be curious, ask questions, problem solve, make connections.

At the end, it was a pleasure to attend this course. It was unique and should be continued… Thank you!

So what was the entire course about?!

About everything , there were talking about various subjects (SOA, project management, weather, phone hacking etc.) in lectures.

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

Overall I think that this course was very valuable. At last I realized what is SOA, and why do we need SOA at all.

There was much talk about project management, and such talks allowed me to get a global view of how projects are managed.

It was very good experience working in project, it gave me a very valuable knowledge how web services are implemented.

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

It is very hard to describe immediate benefit, which I have got in this course, I think the benefit will come out later, because the gained knowledge are always useful, sooner or later.

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

SOA is “unknown land” for my company bosses where I am working, at the current time, and I don’t think that I could realize my gained knowledge about SOA at the current job. Maybe if I change my job, I could apply my knowledge.

How do you see SOA in 5 years from now?

I think after 5 years SOA will be a prevailing software engineering practice, ending long year’s domination of monolithic software architecture

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

I would say, that there’re only arguments for being “totally online”, because what you need, you get immediately. The point of being “totally online” is that you save your time, your money and yourself, “totally online” computing makes the world go around faster and faster.

How would you use Web 2.0 in commercial projects?

There’re plenty of Web 2.0 enabled products online, and each one offers pretty much all the same things: blogging, sharing anything and mashing together services you need. So, if I had a choice, I would try to mush up existing services into one new product.

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

It would be great idea to define the scope of the course. Do we talk about SOA, project management or about man’s life?

Practical projects should be announced earlier, not at the end of course, and the giving mark rules should be announced earlier too.

What the lecturers did wrong?

First: Lectures took approximately about 5 – 6 hours at Saturdays, and everybody would agree that lectures were too long.

Second: Irregular lectures at Saturdays (it was difficult to plan my weekends).

Third: Too much small talk and too less meaningful talk.

Off course there were some interesting lectures, but also some extremely boring and prolonged.

What the lecturers were good at?

Lecturers really know how to excite student’s interests and curiosity, and involve students in discussions, and it was quite interesting listen to lecturers how they’re sharing their experience with us. Also Lecturers were really damn good orators.

Donatas G.edgaudas

It was two possibities : SOA or coding teory. Coding teory I already had.So I am here J

# 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)? I don’t use skills from this SOA course, because I don’t need it NOW. Maybe in the feature… What  I’ve gained?

1.      What is SOA?

2.      How do it?

3.      Something about projects management

4.      Something about life

# How do you see SOA in 5 years from now?

Major part of today’s technologies will be service-oriented. All business organizations will use SOA approach to manage their business processes. It will be more SOA tools.

# What are the pros and cons of “totally online” computing? Think of the Yahoo Pipes – you basically depend totally on the connections.

Pros fresh data at any moment, ability to select from a variety of services,

Cons SECURITY. It is very important to save PC resources.

# How would you use Web 2.0 in a commercial projects? Web 2.0 is, in short: social computing + data mash-ups + rich interfaces.

Data mach-up is GOOD. Our project shown that there are a lot of things we can do with web 2.0. So, we need just to sit and think for a while….

# 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?

Good

 1.      inviting other people to talk about SOA(their personal experience): Jonathan Briggs J, … 

  2.      each student had a possibility to ask and start a  discussion

3.      the alive and friendly communications

4.      practical project

Wrong:

1.      I miss more specific about technologies in SOA

2.      lectures could be shorter

3.      sometimes too many “philosophy of life”

4.      lectures Saturdays!!! Not good!

5.      too long dinner break

6.      very short time to do the project

What is the immediate benefit for you in your current professional situation? How do you see SOA being helpful in your professional environment?

I didn’t find immediate benefit for my current professional situation. But who knows, maybe in the future I will use skills from this SOA course, because (from Laimis feedback J ) „I think SOA idea will have a devastating power in near future, especially with new technologies and new emerging possibilities.“

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)?

It’s all about getting a wider look on things. There was a good example – Adomas told us about the project that he knew was going to fail, or at least not going to be finished, but was started to implement, anyway – just to get knowledge and experience that would be useful in the future projects. I think that this kind of thinking, among other things, is what an architect needs. Another useful experience was working on our project. It was fun to participate in all the steps of production, from generating ideas to discussing implementation details.

What is the immediate benefit for you (if any) in your current professional situation?

I don’t think there are any benefits right now. The course is one of the reasons behind my current thoughts about changing job, though.

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.

I’m working with an Intranet system of one company, and there are oh-so-many things that could be changed with SOA. Sometimes a bunch of systems needs to cooperate to achieve certain functionality and their interactions are quite complex. If only the systems could be changed so that their functions were provided as services…

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

Well, SOA will not change the world. It will still be a tool like any others – if used wisely and in place, it can help. I think more and more business organizations, both in Lithuania and the rest of the world, will use SOA approach to manage their business processes.

What are the pros and cons of “totally online” computing? Think of the Yahoo Pipes – you basically depend totally on the connections.

The most fresh data, saved PC resources, ability to select from a variety of services are amongst the advantages. Security and availability risks are what you have to handle with when you do online computations.

How would you use Web 2.0 in a commercial projects? Web 2.0 is, in short: social computing + data mash-ups + rich interfaces.

I think this question is too general. It depends on the project, actually.

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

I would split this course into two parts: lectures and seminars. In my opinion, course was organized as if everyone attending it already had some background in SOA and Web services, when it was not true, in fact. I think that at least basic concepts should have been explained for the audience, and that would be the lectures part. The seminars would have similar form to those that we actually have attended: open discussions, business perspective, guest speakers, etc. They could even take place on Saturdays, but they should not be so long

What the lecturers were good at?

The relations that lecturers created between themselves and the students is what impressed me most. Just a small example – I don’t remember any other course having it’s blog, where any student can share his thoughts and findings about the topic. Inviting people from the industry to talk about SOA in practice was another splendid idea. I’m still sorry I couldn’t be there when A. Šermokas shared his experience.

What the lecturers did wrong?

The scope of the lectures was not defined, or defined too widely, if you wish. That caused lecturers (and us) wandering all around. It wasn’t always very bad, but I would have liked more concreteness. The idea about projects was really great, but it came out quite late. It was not a big problem for our roaring team, but knowing in advance is always better.

Here are my comments about the course…

What is the added value (if any) of attending this course for you, as a future software systems architect?

Well, I’ve got some new picture of how systems could be made using some other already existing systems, that I can grab something from there and there and make something new, and I need a lot less resources (including money) than making everything myself.

What is the immediate benefit for you (if any) in your current professional situation?

Not much. But as my current job is web development, I now give more attention to Web 2.0 things. No SOA at the moment, but who knows…

I also started using del.icio.us where I can bookmark what I might need at work, and it helps a lot.

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.

Well, we have some web-based systems that at some points are similar or even identical, so really could avoid that recurrence using SOA and WS.

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

Well, 5 years in IT world is a huge period and I guess no one knows what really is gone happen But I think SOA will become one of the main architectures used in system development. I’ve read a couple of topics about Web 3.0, and they all say that Web 3.0 will be based on services and service-based architectures. Locals are also getting into SOA, and I guess in 5 years many huge projects will be based on SOA/WS, and I do hope that all public offices will be able to exchange information using SOA/WS, and this of course will save our time.

What are the pros and cons of “totally online” computing? Think of the Yahoo Pipes – you basically depend totally on the connections.

Well, I receive RSS feeds and don’t need to check all the news portals or blogs, so I save a lot of time. I have a Gmail account, and can read/write my email wherever I am, if I can get online, of course. If I cannot, I can read/write using my mobile phone – it rocks! There is a dictionary, an encyclopedia and almighty Google, where I can find anything (or at least almost everything) I want. I can find exact locations using map services. I have my bookmarks at del.icio.us, my calendar at Google Calendar, and my to-do list at Vitalist. I pay taxes using e-bank, I buy using e-shop. And all this rocks! Because it saves a lot of time, so I have more time to make money, meet my friends or just have a good time

The only big problem is security. If someone really wants and has enough power, he can know everything about me: who are my friends, how much time do I spend with them and where (just open your Gmail account), what are my plans and when, what sites do I visit and how often, what did I buy and when. I’m not so important person at the moment, so I think I’m not interesting. But maybe I will be someday?

How would you use Web 2.0 in commercial projects?

AJAX rules! It makes web systems more user-friendly and more interactive.

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

At first I thought – oh, my Saturdays are going to be stolen. But they weren’t. It was a good decision to make such lectures on Saturday. I think there should be a little bit more technical talks, also more detailed experience sharing, such as Albertas Šermokas did. That was a very great lecture. Actually, there could be as much guest as it could be – including both, local and global This blog was also a good idea. I’d also inform students that there will be an hour break, so they can go for a walk and have a dinner

What the lecturers were good at?

Converting an exam to a project It’s much more valuable and interesting. Trying to involve students into discussions – sorry, it’s something new to us (I mean discussions during lectures), so we weren’t very active

What the lecturers did wrong?

Projects should be given somewhere in the middle of the semester, however they could be ended earlier too – 4 to 6 weeks should be enough. Also there were too much “out of topic” talks. And the dinner, of course

I’d also want to thank Giedrius and Adomas for sort of Study 2.0 example. It really was one of the best courses I’ve ever had (at university), and one of the most valuable.

Have a good summer!