Hi Everyone,

I am starting the november 20th SOA with Spring bootcamp. Unfortunately I could not find a physical location for this bootcamp so I am moving it to the virtual world. Using skype, forums and available free services out on the internet. If you are interested please send me an email with subject “SOA Spring Bootcamp” and I will start sending you daily material and instruction on how to setup and join the course. We will have gathering on weekly basis if all members requested that. Meanwhile I will look for a location to host this bootcamp.

emails: adorandish@gmail.com

What will you learn in this training:

• Spring Core
• Spring MVC
• Spring AOP
• Spring and RESTful Services
• Sample project to cover Core/MVC/AOP/RESTful
• Spring and Tiles
• What’s SOA
• Developing Sample SOA Project with Spring
• Basics of Maven
• Basics of workig with SubVersion Respotiroy
• Agile programming

What you need to have

• Understanding of Java and some years experience developing Java
• Basic Linux commands

Today I discovered I am the 4,200,403,110th among the living human and 78,642,216,291st who has ever lived on this planet according to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515

I cannot believe I felt like this today after hearing that Steve Jobs is no longer among us. Today is the saddest day of my life. The world lost a visionary and I lost a mentor.

Edison and Tesla gave us light, Mozart and Vivaldi gave us music, Alexander Graham Bell gave us connection, einstein gave us the possibility, Steve combined them all and put the world at our fingertips. May his memory, life and death be an inspiration to all out of the box thinkers, the different ones, the ones who believe they can change the world for better.

My condolences to the world and more importantly to his family. He will be missed.

I just wanted to share one of my favorite magazines for software architects here at http://www.soamag.com/

The word architect according the Meriam-Webster is “a person who designs and guides a plan or undertaking”. But is this the only thing a software architect needs to do?

An architect who designs buildings does not need to worry about the construction man and how or what he/she thinks or feels about the design. A building architect’s blueprints will always be executed meticulously.

But a software architect needs to massage the developers egos. He needs to learn how to play politics sometimes.

My word of advise to all new architects:

• Kill your ego
• Learn how to communicate
• Be generous with your explanations
• Always have a PoC done

Let’s start by making our security server.

• Download “Virtual Box” and install it on your development machine. I personally use Apple.
• Download a copy of Fedora Linux Operating System

Let’s start installing the Fedora Operating System:

• Open or run VirtualBox
• Click on Next
• Enter “opensso” as your VM name
• Select Linux as your operating system and the select fedora
• Set 400MB as your RAM and click next
• select “Create new hard disk” that open another installation window, click on next
• select “Dynamically expanding storage” and click on next
• select a location for your virtual hard drive  file
• set the size to 8GB and click on next
• click on finish
• click on finish

Now you can install fedora operating system on your virtual hard drive. To do that you need to map the fedora iso file (DVD image).

• click on the storage:
  

Choosing servers, development languages, and supporting frameworks and technologies depends on your organization size, ability to support the developed solutions, in-house expertise and skills, deadlines, as well as the set or given budgets. Using open source technologies and products will not necessarily be most inexpensive way to go as the expertise in such technologies are expensive. But initially our focus will  be open source technologies and products.

Let’s work on a simple enterprise setting. To do that we need to ask ourselves several questions:

1. Are there any existing systems to integrate to?
2. What kind of application are we going to develop?
   brand new web application?
   web application integrating to an existing infrastructure?
   a middle-ware application?
   a middle-ware application exposed as services?
   standalone desktop application?
   or maybe combination of all?
3. what kind of security do we need?
4. what level of distribution is required or demanded?
5. are we utilizing an existing code?
6. where do we host the application?
7. can we afford multiple hardware? or should be use virtualization?
8. are we creating a cloud environment?
9. what type development standards are we adhering to? SOA? Client Server? standalone?
10. how many users are going to support?
11. do we need clustering or failover?

Assume we are going to host the application in-house for a company that can only afford one server. But up-time and fail-over are demanded as our client is dealing with financial transaction. That alone speaks for itself that a proper security system should be in place. The client is also going to utilize an existing code and want to expose some of the business functions to business partners. The client doesn’t want to pay licenses for development environment or platform but willing to hire one or two experts to support the upcoming application. Another important requirement from the client is saving some financial documents. Let’s assume the client also needs a portal looking application.

So we have to have and support:

• Application Server
• Web Server
• Security
• Possibly LDAP / DB to support security
• A document management of sort
• Portal
• Database

In next few months I am going to spend sometime documenting the process of setting up environments for a proper enterprise application using open source projects and products from Apache and JBoss. I will try to use real life situations such as integration to existing system, such as the ones developed using COBOL or other frameworks and technologies such as applications done using .NET. I will blog my experience here for others to users.