Service Oriented Architecture

I finished reading Enterprise SOA - Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices (Dirk Krafzig, Karl Banke, Dirk Slama).

It seems to be one of the higher rated SOA books on Amazon. That is why I also read Thomas Erl's SOA (Concepts, Technology, and Design) book.

This book seems to show a little more hands on knowledge and things to watch out for rather than web service specifications. Although SOA is most commonly thought of along with WS-* specifications, SOA can be implemented without web services.

The big benefits I see are reusability and interoperability. Reusability in exposing small functional pieces that can be put together for strategic reasons through an orchestration. Interoperability in exposing siloed pieces of functionality of an organization to allow all the information to work together. By exposing different platforms(Java, .NET, mainframe,...), the organization can more easily build enterprise applications to meet short and long term goals.

Definitions of SOA:

A Service-Oriented Architecture(SOA) is a software architecture that is based on the key concepts of an application frontend, service, service repository, and service bus. A service consistes of a contract, one or more interfaces, and an implementation. (Krafzig, p. 57)


SOA is a form of technology architecture that adheres to the principles of service-orientation. When realized through the Web services technology platform, SOA establishes the potential to support and promote these principles throughout the business process and automation domains of an enterprise. (Erl, p.54)


Some videos:

Missing the coolest job ever!

I joined the French Foreign Legion in 1994 and served 5 years there.

Legionnaire number 185565!

C'est la vie!

I miss those days. The spartan lifestyle, physical activity, living a dream!

Thanks to youtube I can get all pumped up and relive it!

Incredible!

I am so glad I went and did it.

ActiveBPEL Vendor Selector Visio Diagram

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, I thought I would publish a diagram of the Vendor Selector Application that I build using the ActiveBPEL Designer 3.0.


The code can be downloaded from last month.

The cool visio symbols for the web services were taken from Mai-lan's Visio Blog. They look cool and provide a different symbol to signify web services.

Scrum has started

Well, I finished writing the final exam for COMP 689 - "Advanced Distributed Systems" last Friday. It was an interesting exam and I will find out in a couple of weeks how it went.

Also had some good news, I won a scholarship for last years marks in my Masters program.

I won a Queen Elizabeth II Scholarship Awards
http://www.athabascau.ca/registrar/studawrds/winners.php
It was nice but there is much still to be done, I have one more course then I am to start my Thesis Essay in the fall.

Back to work topics, we have started to follow a Scrum process. It basically is the Scrum 15 minute daily meeting along with charting progress in the Scrum Backlog.

The backlog is powerful in providing an instance picture of progress in the project. We kept the estimates of individual task items to 2 days most. I am one of the four developers in the project. We are currently above the burn down chart. This is okay as scrum is a learning process.

Today I did not get what I wanted finished but 2 other developers finished 2 days work each that day. So that means that it was a great day for the team. The feedback and tracking is pretty instantaneous and I can see how greater visibility into team progress is given using the burndown chart.