From SOA buzzwords to WS-Confusion and back to Earth

In brief, I was not very interested in web services and tried not to get involved as it was possible. Shame on me. (more…)

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

It seems course is at end and conclusions about the whole course are waiting to be written down. To get categorized data from this feedback I’ll simply answer some questions, posted by lecturer.

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

I’m not new with Service Oriented Architecture. A few years ago my cousin together with a few others founded Netvision systems trademark/company (http://www.netvision.lt), which primary work field is creation and design of internet sites, search engine optimization (SEO), e-marketing and so on. Flooded with my cousins ideas about new possibilities I realized that my minds are also searching for an original, profitable idea, which could be implemented by using Service Oriented Architecture. Despite my efforts I always found my “new” ideas already implemented:)

I was a little bit skeptical about SOA possibilities in Lithuania, so I was expecting to drive these thoughts away with help of this course. And I think it was quite successful (what an interesting ideas we got there!).

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

This course for me was an optional way to find something interesting. I didn’t find immediate benefit for my current professional situation. My general attention is turned to fields, directly related with my path of career, which is not connected with SOA, however there is another kind realation with SOA principles in my work (get from many, do for many) , where these principles can help to create The Power To Know.

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

I think SOA idea will have a devastating power in near future, especially with new technologies and new emerging possibilities. Expansion of SOA based services leads to “user friendly internet” where everyone can find everything. At this point I completely agree with Andrius that sooner or later we “would need to work with projects that should be implemented by SOA principles”.

How do you see SOA in 5 years from now?

With a growing abilities to aggregate information in one user friendly place SOA principles should rule all over even more.

Try to imagine the internet site with one button with label: “do what I mean”. First step in “matrix” implementation?:)

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

Totally computing might involve heavy calculations “on the fly”, what means high sensitivity to mistakes. From opposite point of view we always could have fresh information/report. However, the fact that “totally online” computing could ensure the way to get fresh data at any moment does not mean the comfortable way to use it.

Today for heavy systems “totally” is impossible.

How would you use Web 2.0 in commercial projects?

Well, our team tried wikispaces during our project implementation and found it quite helpful when interacting among members. I also agree with Andrius opinion that the use of web2.0 could “provide better interaction between developers and users” and could “lead to a better implementation and more important to greater usefulness of the service or product“. However, I think it could help, but not completely change the way developers and users interact nowadays.

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

I think there should be more talk about SOA and what’s related with it.

Also would be great to announce practical tasks earlier.

What the lecturers did wrong?

I am working student what means not much free time. I remember the first time I visited seminar, I saw unprepared lecturers speaking of philosophy of live, what is interesting but after 10 minutes it is annoying. I wasn’t inspired too much to visit more such a Seminars on Saturdays, so It would be great to have more talk about SOA.

What the lecturers were good at?

Guests from various companies help to see the things from practical point of view. Lecturers shared their personal experience, they knew how to speak with students in “human language”, each student had a possibility to interrupt lecturers and ask questions, even start a discussion! Outstanding.

One of requirements to be eligible for the mark is to write a feedback post about our thoughts about the course, discussed concepts ant technologies. So I would like to answer the questions lecturers asked from my perspective. (more…)

“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…)

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!

So, our course is going to the end and we need to finish our tasks too. I am happy that our practical project went successfully and I hope we will have a good presentation today. However, we still have one more task to do. Everyone should write a post about the course, SOA and everything that all these Saturdays gave to us.

(more…)

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.

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

The advance program of the 2007 IEEE Congress on SERVICES has been announced. I am looking forward to SOAk-up lots of SOA stuff there

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.

… 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.

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.

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“.