Small College

I spent all day yesterday at an Oracle Fusion Middleware: Higher Education Oracle SOA Workshop. It was a great opportunity to get an introduction to SOA methodology and the Oracle toolset. In a past life (for about five minutes) I pretended to be a programmer and application developer (OK, even a DBA). But really, I just knew enough to break stuff. 

 

The first part of the workshop was thrilling. I had one of those “a-ha” moments where suddenly everything you’re working on and technology finally align;  and in that one perfect moment everything comes together in absolute clarity!

 

A few weeks ago we launched an initiative at Maryland Institute College of Art called “MICA Connected”. The goal of this two year project is to re-define our web presence and our web services – to connect all of our systems and processes in a way that is much more accessible to our communities --  and in a way that greatly improves our business and the services we offer. (Reminder: this is a blog. I work in the Technology department – not PR or Communications. This is my characterization of the project; not an official statement from Maryland Institute College of Art.)

 

Some key components to MICA Connected are:

For more than a year, I’ve been absolutely convinced that this vision of MICA Connected is the direction we need to go in (from a technology perspective). However, I have such a minimal understanding (OK….no understanding) of the current tools and methodologies that can be used to make this a reality. My “a-ha!” moment came today when we were talking about SOA and standards based communications. The concept that components of our Oracle system (PeopleSoft Enterprise is what they’re calling it these days) can be exposed and accessible so that we can seamlessly integrate information into Blackboard, Resource25, our public website, WebTMA, Diebold and anything else we could hope for. In the first two hours of this class it was as if all the grand forces aligned to deliver a real solution to our goals. 

 

I didn’t see it coming, and it was…of course…to good to be true.

 

The next four hours of the class were a lab where we got to build our own SOA services using data from an Oracle/PeopleSoft Learning Solution database. I cannot overstate the value of this kind of hands-on work. Even though we followed templates and utilized some shortcuts – the experience of building not one; not two; but three SOA applications in the lab environment was terrific. For me, however, this also paralleled Dorothy’s experience of seeing the wizard revealed.

 

Here’s what’s behind the curtain: