EAI Blog

I have to admit-- midterm exams are a lot more enjoyable when you're in jammies. 

I agree with Mary (I think that's whose blog it was).  It is very interesting and somewhat comical that SOAP no longer stands for anything.  In IT though it seems that people are so accustomed to acronyms, and at least in my company often don't ever know what they stand for, that the actual meanings are somewhat arbitrary.  If they were to change the acronym SOAP to something that is more current and accruate I have a feeling that most people would continue to refer to it as SOAP just because thats what its always been for them.

In the past I have been weary of XML, possibly because I never knew what the acronym stood for, but mostly because I had no idea what XML docs were used for.   The exercise was helpful because it wasn't complicated and revealed all the different aspects that are behind viewing an XML file.  Now eXtensible Markup Language files won't be quite as foreign and its nice to have one less unknown acronym floating around.

I really liked the last section of the reading we had to do for yesterday's class.  It shows that no matter how much a company or even a specific project can get wrapped up in what is happening today, it is also essential to keep looking forward.  If big companies like Wachovia are directing focus towards streamlining processes and virtualization many more companies are likely to follow suit.

I'm not really sure what the original intent was for a work-around, but we got as far as informing the clients that there was another project team working on a "compatability pak" for the two applications and they decided to no longer pursue the use of Sharepoint.  Things were becoming too complicated for them, with both the Microsoft products and other internal issues.

I've discovered several ways in which I already work with Application Integration in my job. 

In a very simplistic sense--  I am currently trying to work out a solution to allow a client to have functionality with both existing XP Windows programs that are built into business applications she uses everyday, and Windows 2003 applications which are necessary for the new Microsoft SharePoint 2007 suite I am supposed to be setting her up to use.  It's more complicated than it sounds and is involving alot of negiotiation with both my co-workers in the IS department and the clients on the business side.... all in a days work....

This is my first blog entry.  This class sounds like it will be interesting...especially using VisualBasic for something a little more applicable to real-world situations than I have in past courses.