Friday, October 14, 2005

SOA Boot Camp: Days 4 & 5

I was way too tired to blog about the boot camp last night - so now I'm playing catch up...

Day 4 focused on service design: best practices in message creation, encoding types, scoping the port types, importing common types, etc. We all agreed that the current documentation around 'best practices in service design' is still pretty weak.

We also had the whole class do contract first design - and then bind it back to platform implementations, in our case Java. As a reference, we went through Axis, ActiveSOAP and XMLBeans just to give everyone a feel for the various components.

Day 5 moved into testing. Roland Lynn and Wayne Ariola from Parasoft gave us a serious lesson on SOA based testing. Their suite has extensive capabilities for generating test suites and executing the tests across just about any configuration (encodings, transports, attachments). We were also educated on static analysis techniques and scanning for malicious attacks. The session ended with an impressive view of their SOA based load testing capability.

SOA testing is going to have to enter mainstream. It was really kind of odd to see that the state of the art in testing is beyond just about all other aspects of SOA infrastructure. Who'd of thought?

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