I’ve got some side projects I’ve been helping out on that are near launch, but by and large, my development has been fairly boilerplate using my standard technology stack. The day job is cool tech, but mostly hacking about on real engineering problems that don’t make for interesting blog material (unless you care to read about removing single points of failure and various linux hacking). The mechanics of managing monthly release schedules and processes isn’t exactly a “page turner” either.

I’m hoping to push some of these projects into new territory in the future, but for now, I’m doing stuff that doesn’t make for an exciting blog. Time to start gathering some Deep Thoughts.

If you’re in Java, and in Atlanta, tonight is AJUG, and you should drop in if you get the chance. The topic will be Service Oriented Architecture, and the presenter looks qualified enough, though there’s a definite risk of degeneration into a vendor-specific presentation (though AJUG has done a good job of reigning this in recently). Details are here.

Though many could rightly criticize SOA as a mere repackaging of SOAP and Web Services, I’ll be going for the broader understanding of usage patterns and best practices – not as much for the nuts and bolts of how to implement SOA (alternately stands for Same Old Architecture). An interesting wrinkle in SOA in the modern web development era is the idea that you could use the same web service to feed B2B applications AND as a source of data for an AJAX component (Amazon.com could easily do this).