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Let me paint you a picture. I work for BYU’s Enterprise Project Management office and I needed to get some data that was in another database into our project management tool Mariner. This product allows me to use javascript to do things in the application that it does not do delivered. This presented a problem because javascript does not execute SQL commands. I turned to my friend Jimmy Zimmerman for help. He showed me a short tutorial on Asynchronous Javascript And XML (AJAX) and I was hooked. With the help of Jimmy I was able to retrieve the values out of the financial database by calling an asp page that executed a SQL statement and returned a value to the javascript. This script allowed me then to pass the value back to the Mariner application. This has made my life a little easier and my boss a little happier.

The concept of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one that is gaining ground quickly. I think that one of the main reasons for this is because people don’t want to constantly be reinventing the wheel. While in a Java programming class at BYU I was writing code to do simple things such as finding which time and date was the first in a series. I knew that someone in this world had to have already created some code that would do this for me, but yet I had to do it to get he grade.

This is where SOA comes into play. SOA allows you to plug into code that has already been written by yourself or someone else. This reusing of code helps to reduce costs of the project.

Another benefit to SOA is that it is easier to debug. When you build one part of the puzzle and test it all out and it works fine you can move on. You can add another piece to it and if it breaks it you pull that piece back out and you haven’t ruined any of your other code. “When a large number of IT systems are coupled together with spaghetti connections that use different technologies, the dependencies make it hard to change any part of the system without breaking something else.The sources of these side effects are hard, if not impossible, to find.” (BEA White Paper – IT Transformation to Service-Oriented Architecture)

Working for BYU’s Enterprise Project Management department I have seen this being used. The Office of Information Technology (OIT) has put this concept into use with their Route Y portal. This portal allows a user to navigate to different services such as email, payroll, registration and much more.

I plan to use some of Google’s API’s and the GWT to leverage the great minds that they have working there.

In times past there has been little information to base decisions on. Since the computer age started we have been gathering large amounts of data in huge databases. What do we do with all this information? Patch work at best! As a system administrator I get asked all the time to combine data from different databases together so that we can get reports that we can base our decisions on. Doing this type of work takes a lot of time and expertise. The average user can not create a report with the information he wants with relative ease. What is the answer to this?

IBM has a solution called the Master Data Management which is supposed to “reliably synchronize all important business information dimensions such as customers and products across multiple systems” Who really believes that this is attainable? Not I! There are too many different conventions that are implemented when creating databases that it would be highly unlikely to happen. One of the only ways that I think this could be accomplished is by creating databases with a standard so that they can be more easily integrated. This can still get out of control really quickly.

Because of this constant problem of integrating information this will provide job security for me and many other information systems graduates.

As part of a class requirement for my Isys 532 class I am starting to blog. These posts will be primarily about technology and how it is changing our lives. I will be discussing some of the new technologies that are making headlines like the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).