EAI Blog

Not much to say this week. I've still been slacking on both these items. I've found a few sources for my paper and gotten an idea on what I'd like to write about.. so that's a plus. Other than that, it's going to be a busy week/weekend.

Sadly, break is over. I have to get going on that paper which is due in a couple weeks! I forgot about lab 3b till today when I was browsing the blog entries and noticed people talking about it. Yet another thing to catch up on!

In the end, I'm very pleased that the exam was online. I liked the fact that you could look up the answers to confirm the initial instinct and it obviously helps when you don't have much of an idea what the answer is. The slides and book were extremely helpful. Hopefully I did well.

This week I'm looking forward to lab 3 and working with SAP. In one of my other classes we are at a similar stage with SAP (SAP BW). We have basically just created a large number of objects and just started working with them. I'm looking forward to building on past labs and working towards the big picture rather than just individual objects.

Last weeks lab went smoothly. I was somewhat familiar with creating objects since I'm also getting some SAP experience in 536 (Business Intel. which deals with data warehousing etc..). I felt more comfortable doing this lab than the last.. especially since we did a preview in class prior to lab.

I'm looking forward to doing some research on my topic for the term paper. I chose to do my paper on CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture). I mainly chose it because it was one of the provided topics. But after briefly skimming over the topic matter on Wikipedia, it seems interesting.

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.

This past week I learned a lot about XML. Up until this point, I haven't had much experience with it. The only time I ever worked with it it was in Bus 435 when we were making websites we used an XML file to create the SiteMapPath to handle the navigation controls. Also, I had never worked with web services. I still don't understand everything that is going on with them since I went through the lab so quickly simply to get it done. I need to get back in the habit of reading the chapters.. haven't been on top of that.

I never realized how commonplace integration of applications could be required for a given business. I always assumed it was for massive overhauls like in the Wachovia case where they completely changed their system. But through the excercise, I can see how having to integrate could occur more frequently, especially if there are differences in language and data that is stored (like in the exercise).