One of the reasons why I have been very quiet lately on this weblog is the SOA Training Program we started at AMIS, two weeks ago. With 11 experienced developers – 10 from AMIS and one guest from one of our partnerts – we started an intensive training program with festive kick-off, including bubbles.
Half of the students primarily has a Oracle development and database background and the other half primarily a Java/J2EE development and architect background. A great mix – that will help build some mutual understanding as well.
In ten bi-weekly sessions – with additional homework assignments between sessions – we will explore many facets of the Oracle 10g SOA Suite and how to use it in actual SOA projects. Note: this is a training for developers. While we discuss SOA concepts and the implications of SOA for the business as well as the (business) process focus and the link with BPM – it is primarily a technical training.
One of my tasks was the preparation of the material for the first session: the XML Fundamentals necessary for doing SOA. The session discussed XML, Use of Namespaces, XML Schema Definition, XPath and XSLT. The homework assignment had the students install JDeveloper 10.1.3.3, the XPath plugin and read some material on XML. The session itself had a lot of slides, some demo’s and discussion and a bunch of hands-on practices. The remainder of the practices constituted half of the home work. The other half consisted of installing the Oracle 10g SOA Suite in the Virtual Machine we distributed to the students as well as getting the first BPEL process to run. Serious business for our students!
The coming sessions discuss the BPEL Process Manager and the design, deployment and testing of BPEL Processes; use of the Oracle Adapter Framework – including Database Adapter, File & FTP adapter and JMS Adapter; the Human Workflow and the interaction with Identity Stores, notification framework and email server; Enterprise Service Bus; Web Service Manager (Governance, SLA management, Security) and Service Registry. We are considering spending some time on BPA, BAM, ODI – but it really depends on how the training program proceeds where the focus will be. It is our ambition to bring a lot of our every day SOA practice into the program. It will help our students to better grasp how to participate in our SOA projects.
All of the material we develop is published on our internal Wiki. It is easy for us trainers to collaborate on creating that material. More importantly, that means it is available to all our colleagues, not just the happy few that participate in this first edition of the program. Note: we had many more candidates than we could accomodate so we had to disappoint quite a few of them.
The first of several books the participants in the program will receive – Ben Margiolis – SOA for the Business Developer (Concepts, BPEL and SCA) – April
2007, MC Press, ISBN 1-58347-065-4 – is of course also in our library.
We hope to run a second edition of the SOA training program in the fall of 2008.
![Using .NET Stored Procedures in Oracle 10gR2]({"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"http:\/\/seattletimes.nwsource.com\/ABPub\/2012\/08\/02\/2018836700.jpg","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"} "Using .NET Stored Procedures in Oracle 10gR2")
Matt, Thanks for your positive comments! So far it works very well and the whole group seems to be really engaged. For us teachers it is probably the most fun. To have a very captive audience that really tries its very best to absorb all the topics we discuss, participate in group discussions and work very hard on the hands-on assignments. By the way: it is a shared investment: the training development and half of the session time for the students is paid for by AMIS, the other half and the home-work assignments are the students’ own time. Of course books, materials and diner is on the house. It seems like a fair deal – and everybody benefits!
best regards, Lucas
Congratulations on being able to start such a great training. So many companies are too concerned about losing productivity to offer extensive training like this. They pay for it later when their staff is not prepared for the next project or technology or staff leave for a different company that will train them.
I like the schedule of ten biweekly sessions to allow them to “stay productive”. The homework is the key so they can use what they’re learning instead of forgetting it. Hope you’ll share the progress. Good luck!