I was glad that we went more in depth on Web Services. As I stated in my last blog entry, I wasn't that clear on what was going on from lab1. Also, I hadn't previously learned much about middleware till this week. In my other class (533 - Infrastructure), we've talked about communication models like synchronous/asynchronous and connection/connectionless. So these were some familiar terms on the messaging types. I hope we talk about more specific examples of middleware later tonight.
I did the XML exercise last week and it went smoothly. It was very easy to make your own document and use that existing style sheet for display purposes. I was happy to get a bit more exposure with this.