Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Australia's Digital Education Revolution is Truly Revolutionary

It's been less than a year since I wrote an Open Letter to the Australian Prime Minister (Kevin Rudd, then newly-elected) suggesting that when he delivered on his election promise to equip every schoolchild with a computer, he should favour Linux and Open Source software.

Now I don't know whether he read that letter or not, but the New South Wales state government (not to be confused with the Australian federal government) may be independently doing just that, using federal government funding provided to the states under the banner of Rudd's digital education revolution.

From the news item, it looks like NSW students are about to be introduced to Edubuntu, a variant of the extremely friendly Ubuntu distribution that I use, a variant specially designed for schoolchildren and packed with educational software. My son has been using an Edubuntu desktop for a year now, and has recently been introduced to the pleasurable power of the GIMP and XBMC as an aid to doing school projects.

Revolutionary indeed!

Thursday, October 02, 2008

How SOFEA fits into a SOA Ecosystem

How do user interface front-ends fit into a landscape that is increasingly service-oriented? A brief discussion yesterday with Peter Svensson sparked off a flurry of activity, and this diagram is the result. Thanks, Peter. Thanks also to Justin Meyer for his feedback and suggestions.

I won't waste words here, except to say that this diagram and its accompanying text should be sufficient to show how a SOFEA-based client application fits into a Service-Oriented ecosystem and works seamlessly with services (both SOAP and REST) and with processes (both the orchestrated and the choreographed variety).

[For those who are wondering what SOFEA is, read this gentle introduction. The original detailed paper is here and my original blog posting on it is here. There is also the original ServerSide article, but be warned that it points to an earlier version of the paper. Then there's the InfoQ article co-authored with Peter Svensson, which is not just about SOFEA but a family of similar architectures that rationalise the Presentation Tier. And finally, a Google Groups community that any interested party can join.]