Well I completed my midterms and now my horizon is set on completing the word document format of my term paper.
I am taking a 5 day trip during the week of spring break to North Carolina. I hope to leverage my time by completing the paper during the trip.

Wow this semester is going by fast. I can't beleive it is already almost halftime. I have kept up on the readings and reviewing of my notes so I am looking forward to doing well on the test. We sure have covered a lot of information over the past month and a half, so now it's a matter of organizing the material and my thoughts. I see that we are going to be discussing SOA next week. I am glad since my paper is on SOA Governance and I still don't have that comfortable a grasp of the concept. I bought the optional book "Understanding SOA with Web Services" so I am sure that book will be helpful as secondary readings.

I found an interesting article on SOA Governance written by author David Linthicum.

Hopefully Professor will take a moment and discuss what SOA Governance is during next week's lecture.

Here's an RSS feed you might like to check out.

I also was informed recently about this neat site that you can made donations (loans) to people in need and they actually pay you back. For example, some poor farmer in China needing to buy seed. A pool of people get together $25 max per loan to help someone out. This man then takes the loan out and pays it back little at a time.

Brrrr...this winter is dragging on isn't it. I hear somewhere that we have received 3x the amount of snow as last year. Well, I guess the moisture is good for the outdoors. All this cold weather has prompted my wife and I to book our summer vacation.

I wonder if the groundhog saw his shadow?

At least we don't live in Buffalo, NY.




I have selected the topic of SOA Governance for my term paper. I plan to explore the idea that sound governance is the key to SOA success. So far I have about a dozen referenece resources. I plan to spend quite a bit of time understanding what exactly SOA first. The lab went well on Monday. I enjoyed working with SAP.

Still researching my paper propoal, the nice thing is I have access to Gartner. I have also found that zdnet is a good resource as well. Hoping to have my paper written this weekend. I also need to do the XML exercise as well this weekend.
One area I am exploring for the paper is SOA Goverance. That's all for now.

I enjoyed the lab last week in class and was able to successfully complete it during class.
I haven't used Visual Studio in about a month and it is amazing how rusty you get, but of course it's like riding a bike.
Now my trick is to go through the lab again and understand how and what it is doing. That will take some time for me.
I am noticing the paper proposal is around the corner, so I better start researching that, maybe this weekend.

Here's a little IT humor.

I found creating this outline helpful while I read Chapter 2 in the textbook:

Database [Storage]: The most popular information producer and consumer by far, databases are natural points of integration because they were designed to produce and consume data, and thus provide the best interface into source and target applications exchanging information. An advantage of using the database as a point of integration is that the interfaces are almost always well defined and tested, and there are many different types of result sets you can request. A disadvantage is that the information produced is typically not bound to business entities. Thus, while you will receive a lot of information, you have to figure out how the information in the result set pertains to the specific process you are working on.

Application logic [Processing] aka API [Application Programming Interface Layer]: Provide interfaces access to information as well as encapsulated processes, additionally to application services. Because interfaces among applications differ so vastly [patterns or standards], you need to address each packaged application individually. Packaged application vendors and developers expose these interfaces to provide access to the business processes and are encapsulated within their applications w/o requiring other developers to invoke the user interface or to go directly to the database. The use of such interfaces creates a benefit for application integration by allowing externally applications to access the information found in these applications w/o making any changes to the packages or to applications themselves. Exposing these interfaces also provides a mechanism to allow encapsulated information to be shared.

User Interface Layer: Leveraging the user interface as a point of information integration is a process known as "screen scraping,"  or accessing screen information through a programmatic mechanism. Many times, application integration projects have no other choice but to leverage user interfaces to access application data and processes, sometimes, due to the fact that underlying databases and application interfaces do not exist. One issue with this type of option is that it cannot scale, so it is unable to handle more than a few screen interfaces at any given time. However, due to the fact that there are many closed and proprietary applications out there, the application integration architect has few choices left. In order to implement this integration type, it is critical to understand the application. This requires understanding the underlying data storage schema, much of the application logic, and, most important, how the information is presented to the user interface. Unlike other interface levels, information presented to a user interface may not map back to a database. Most of the data elements on the screen, such as calculated fields, are created by the application logic and do not come directly from the database.

 

While reading chapter one in the textbook and I found it helpful to note these definitions of different approaches to application integration:

• Information-oriented
• -argue that integration should occur between the databases (data replication, data federation, interface processing)
• Business process integration-oriented
• -products layer a set of easily defined and centrally managed processes on top of existing sets of processes contained within a set of enterprise applications.
• Service-oriented
• -allows applications to share common business logic or methods. This is accomplished either by defining methods that can be shared, and therefore integrated, or by providing the infrastructure for such method sharing such as Web services. Methods may be shared either by being hosted on a central server, by accessing them inter-application, or through standard Web services mechanisms, such as .NET.
• Portal-oriented
• -allows us to view a multitude of systems - both internal enterprise systems and external trading community systems - through a single-user interface or application.