This is it, my first official Blog entry ever.
It is with great honor that I spend some words on the SOA-Knowledge environment. For you who knew SOA-Knowledge in its previous shape it might bring back some memories. For you who did not, it might give you some insights in the platform.
It all started years ago with a very simple problem to be solved. In a highly-distributed team it is not easy to work together on projects. Add on top of that the need for Partners to share the projects as you start to work together on big accounts and you can see that the infrastructure inside the Progress Firewall is not an option anymore. For this initial reason we found the need to get ‘SOA-Knowledge.net’ as our underground Source Sharing Site.
Our little underground adventure started to grow fast and we started to use the site for hosting some great initiatives.
- AMSOA: this was already a great Professional Services Offering in EMEA but using the SOA-Knowledge infrastructure we could evolve it faster and we ended up with SDM as the ‘PS Offering’. Then SDM moved into Engineering and was converted into a Product.
- Split-Join Services: The need for a split and join service on the ESB was driven by an important customer. It was designed and worked out using the SOA-Knowledge infrastructure and the initial services were built. After this, Engineering took the Blue-Prints and replaced some of the Service Code with ESB Internals for better performance and robust memory utilization and a new ESB Boxed Service was born.
- PSO Developed Services quickly found their way into the SOA-Knowledge repositories to be used by the Consultants and Partners but also to be optimized later on.
As a knowledge sharing project, a Wiki was installed in order to give this site a Community Character where everybody was welcome to participate. Unfortunately, for some reason it happened that we only had a few contributors and the real Community feeling was never achieved. Did we let SOA-Knowledge.net down in this area?
As time evolved, the SOA-Knowledge.net site grew into hosting a new vision on using ESB in SOA Oriented Development Environments. This was again the basis for a new ‘Wave’ that is now known as the SDP (Services Delivery Platform). Unfortunately, getting into this path was also using the last breath of the SOA-Knowledge platform as we knew it. Having to host all this new technology was becoming too much for our little old machine and thus we had to migrate to a bigger and more powerful machine. While planning the migration we tried to learn from the past experience. We definitely needed to keep the Code Repositories supported by the SDP Environment. We were not sure of having a Portal Structure in order to create a community but … as we were in the migration process, the SOA-Knowledge site decided to give up on us so we needed to speed-up the migration in the last phase. This all lead to welcoming the new SOA-Knowledge.org platform that will bring us great new developments and carries the SOA-Knowledge.net goals further in the future. Here is the deal … Sign up to this great Field Supporting Platform (https://www.soa-knowledge.org/portal) and let the administrators know about it (soak-admin@progress.com). Once you are entered in the correct group, the ESB will make sure you get access to the SVN repositories and you will be assigned to the SOAK-Portal Community where you find information on the system you will be using. We also provide ways to let you communicate amongst each other and please, if you feel like something is missing or you want to let people know about your ideas or vision, use the system to let everybody know. It is always difficult and dangerous to mention names (especially if you forget some) but I would really like to thank Andreas Gies for the soul he gave to the SOA-Knowledge platform and to Stefan Fritz and Thomas Steinborn (and the ones I missed) for their very valuable contributions. The Technical Architecture Groups are driving this initiative further where I would like to highlight the work of Jamie Townsend who performed the successful migration between the platforms. SOA-Knowledge is dead … Long live SOA-Knowledge!
