ESD.341J Web System Architecting: Building Web Services

Oh goodie, Web System Architecting...at MIT. Sounds like something right up my alley (seeing as I do that for a living). Since I've been architecting web systems for the better part of 8 years, I thought it would be interesting to see the academic approach to doing it.

Unfortunately, the class isn't really about architecting web systems (at least my interpretation of that) and I was extremely disappointed after the first class. During the first lecture, the professor, Dr. John Williams of the Civil & Environmental Engineering department, talked primarily about RFID. At the end of the class I asked a simple question: What does RFID have to do with "architecting web systems"? His answer was that the impending RFID revolution will undoubtedly use web systems to store/report/track RFID information. That's all good, but not exactly what I had taken the class for.

During the second class we had a couple of RFID experts from the AutoID Lab come in and present the latest research and industry progress toward implementing RFID. It was quite engaging and thought provoking. RFID has a chance to revolutionize product tracking. It is intended to replace the antiquated barcode system we use today. This got me a little more excited by the class.

The AutoID Lab needs help coding some web services to show the industry how to exchange RFID information. Our final project is to demo a web service and our class has been gently nudged to write something that can help them out.

After I reset my expectations of the course, I thought it would still be beneficial to stay in it. Dr. Williams is a .NET guy, so all code samples he is going to show will be .NET. Since I've only skimmed the surface of .NET, I think this will be a great opportunity to pick it up. I've asked my editor at O'Reilly to ship me a couple of books on the subject (Programming C# and Programming ASP.NET).