Finally endorsed on Technical blogging

I think technical blogging is one of the most treaded paths by those who are or desire to be seasoned technical developer. I am a "budding" Java developer and I have one year experience at Oracle India and am currently doing an internship at Fidelity Investments in the "Fidelity Web Technology Group".

I have started liking Java since the day I was first asked to learn it due to the requirement of a Java developer at Oracle. During my tenure at Oracle and during the first few semesters at NCSU (North Carolina State University, Raleigh), I have grown very fond of Java and its features.

The first feature of it that endears it to me is its developer-friendliness. The library API's it provides are so understanding of a developer's woes both from a beginner to a experienced perspective.

As specified in most of the textbooks, Java is known for its well-balanced structure where equal importance are given for the three yardsticks of a programming language, speed, portability and security.

More about Java in my next post, as this is a general introduction on what all technologies I am aware of and support.

During the day of writing this blog, I am working as a Software Engineering intern at Fidelity Investments Durham NC. I am working on SOA(Service Oriented Architecture). This is my first exposure to SOA beyond the conceptual level. SOA had always fascinated me though I had never pursued it seriously. The concept of application-centric web, where in the ideal world, the applications themselves search for services, connect and bind to the relevant ones to gain access to the funcitonality is a very promising one.

The web services concept, proposed by IBM in form of white paper in 2000 had caught on like a wild fire among the leading technical companies. The vision of web services includes seamless application-level connectivity adhering to internationally accepted standards, using XMl for messaging given the fact that it represents data in a OS-independent, platform-independent manner. This seamless connectivity ensures the companies to use their legacy systems(built on old, outdated programming languages, but still operational and revenue generating) to interact with the the more current technologies and thus leveraging on this connectivity to get the best of both the worlds(the latest, improved technology and reliability and robustness of the legacy systems).

The number of new technologies involved and the challenge of learning and delivering simultaneously attracted me to web services. I started to search about the relevant literature that might give a good head start on web services. I had a very very tiring and confusing time in this stage( I should say I am still in this stage). The technology is so continuously evolving that textbooks become out of date within couple of years of beign published and the most latest textbooks seem to be assuming certain level of understanding of the web services. After rattling around many books confusingly, I decided the best strategy is to take one of the old books, read the concepts and then go a to a more recent and thus advanced book for more ideas and knowledge. The first book I am planning to read thus is the O'Reilly's "Web Services Essentials". I planning to read only the conceptual part rather than the technical part as it is all outdated now. This will give me the required fundamentals that wuld let me start upon my next book (huge one :( ) " Web Services Architecture" which has very good reviews on Amazon books.