Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
For those who didn’t know, I am currently completing my Honours in Bachelor of Software Engineering with Monash University. I’ll talk more about the Honours project later on.
I have been using OpenOffice 2.4 for documents writing, including my research proposal for the Honours project. It worked quite well, but I have decided to switch to LaTeX to deal with documents writing (for the thesis).
LaTeX is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. It is most often used for medium-to-large technical or scientific documents but it can be used for almost any form of publishing [1].
To get LaTeX up and running on my MacBook, I downloaded the MacTeX package, and the installation was pretty straightforward. The only painful part is, it took away 800MB of my internet allowance, and I think you should know that it will take around 1.6GB disk space to install.
If you’ve not worked with LaTeX before, keep in mind that:
LaTeX is not a word processor!
If you want a decent word processor on Mac OS X, TextMate is what I am using.
Last but not least, always good to have this LaTeX guide around (I’ve had it since my first year in Monash, three years later, I’m using it again): The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e
ref:
- LaTeX project: An introduction
Posted in Honours, Mac OS X | No Comments »
Friday, May 9th, 2008
My Honours supervisor, Dr Sita Ramakrishnan, received an invitation a while back from IBM, to attend their WebSphere for Service-oriented Architecture technical briefing [1]. Having chosen a topic related to service-oriented architecture, she asked me to call up IBM, and ask whether I can attend in her place. I did, registered myself, and I went 
I enjoyed the briefing altogether, below are some brief notes I made during the seminar/talk/workshop:
(Off topic: IBM fed us pretty well, light breakfast, tea breaks, lunch, lots of coffee, thank you!)
Few things I noticed:
- Commercials between topics, they are pretty funny.
- Comparisons to other competitors (eg: Oracle, BEA, Microsoft) - and IBM always win, perfectly.
- Lots of blue color scheme in their slides.
- Their presentations are very marketing-oriented, if that makes sense.
- They like VMware so much, they had 22 images for the demonstrations.
Introduction
Enterprise faces different challenges.
What do they need in this situation? Service-oriented Architecture.
Why? Because of the ease of integration, the agility and fast time to solution.
Gary Andrews introduced us to a fictitious company called Service Oriented Finance.
A service: repeatable business task.
Service orientation: business as linked services.
Service-oriented architecture: an architectural style
Application Infrastructure to Get Started with SOA
WebSphere Application Server.
Free community edition, uses open source technology [2].
Examples: Wimbledon website (1 million hits / minute), Ebay etc.
WebSphere XD = able to update cluster without having to shutdown the server.
Demonstration of WebSphere XD is amazing, they also showed us graphically how things are being processed in a cluster if they are upgrading one of the server in the collection.
WebSphere for SOA
Need more efficiency in your business? Model the processes.
Model processes - WebSphere Business Modeler
Implement processes - WebSphere Integration Developer
Run processes - WebSphere Process Server
+ Human workflow support is what differs IBM from other competitor, WebSphere Integration Developer can generate human support code.
Monitor processes - WebSphere Business Monitor
+ Provide role-based dashboard
+ Detect business situations and take actions
+ Monitor performance of active + historical processes
Integrate People with Process to Enhance Business Value - Portal
WebSphere Portal = Front-end of SOA
Portlets = user facing business services
Used to improve customer satisfactions
Available in B2C, B2E, B2B
REST = Representational State Transfer
Components of Web 2.0 = REST, AJAX, XML data feeds
Portal is quite Web 2.0-ish, from the demonstrations.
IBM supports Dojo toolkit [3], used in Portal.
Web 2.0 Portal vision = An Open Architecture
Note: These notes are not complete, you might be able to see the slides on IBM website [4].
ref:
- The IBM WebSphere for SOA Event
- IBM - WebSphere Application Server Community Edition
- IBM Contributes Ajax Software Development Technology to Open Source Community
- WebSphere for SOA
Posted in Honours, Technology, Web | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
The IBM WebSphere for Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) is a one-day technical briefing with products demonstrations and practical examples. It helps to get you started on the concept of SOA, and also introduce you to more advanced concepts of it.
I am attending the Melbourne session, hopefully it will be very useful for my Honours thesis that is closely related to the SOA / Web Services area. I am particularly interested in what WebSphere can offer us, and the demonstrations of real world scenarios.
Register yourself to attend to any of the sessions:
Tuesday, 6 May
Hilton Hotel
488 George Street,
Sydney, NSW 2000
Australia
Thursday, 8 May
State Library Conference Centre
325 Swanston Street
Melbourne VIC
(entry is via 3 Latrobe street, Melbourne)
Tuesday, 13 May
Hilton Hotel
190 Elizabeth Street,
Brisbane QLD 4000
Posted in Honours, Technology | No Comments »