EAI Blog

I'm glad that the semester is starting to wrap up.  The project is pretty much done (just need to wrap up the final deliverable) and the paper is finished.

My last week - I spent in Austin, TX, learning more about WebSphere Commerce.  The class was made up of about 15 people from a few different companies.  The course was an overview of the capabilities that the application had.  one of the things we learned about was the ability it has to expose itself through web services and other integration techniques (such as messaging through MQueue.)

I'm in Austin this week for a week of training on IBM WebSphere Commerce.

So my teammates and myself divided up the work we are going to do for our project.  I am going to be responsible for the creating the new services in SAP and expose them through a WSDL.  I'm kind of excited to set this portion of the project up.  Hopefully, it goes smoothly.

This past week has been crazy for work.  I was involved in a migration of servers from one hosting data center back to our company.  The team I work with worked a lot of hours to make sure that everything went smoothly.  Happily all of our hard work paid off.  We were at work at 2 in the morning on Saturday switching over our applications. 

One of the applications we moved provides seamless login functionality for other applications - through web services.  It is amazing how much complexity this adds to a move because of how many applications are dependent on its web services.  it also highlights the need for applications that leverage web services to be constructed in a way so that they fail gracefully.

It's nice to have completed another course milestone this past week.  I'm really glad that I picked my topic - Ajax.  I had heard a lot about it from people at work, but did not have a clear understanding of what it was until I did the research for my paper.  It's a pretty cool mix of technology.

BPIOAI was the focus of the readings for this week.  According to the book it's "the ability to define a common business process model that addresses the sequence, hierarchy, events, execution logic, and information movement between systems residing in the same organization and systems residing in multiple organizations."  I wonder how widespread this architecture is.  I think in theory it sounds nice; however, I think for most organizations to implement this they would need to overhaul their whole business process.

Well... I don't have a ton to blog about this week.  But I am happy to report that after much procrastination - I've submitted by midterm. 

My only other comment this week is about the XI mapping tool that we reviewed this week.  I think it's remarkable how polished these types of tools are.  Because it's a lot of coding to map data objects together by hand.  Trust me, I've done it. :)