Today I finished a very interesting course here in Stockholm. Even though things like Service Oriented Architectures (SAO) were not new to me I found it very interesting to have some lectures about the different technologies behind this. Otherwise there is a risk that it becomes not only more than a number of buzz-words. The first SOA part contained a good disussion about what a service is, how small or big it should be and how handle versioning of services. The second part focused more on the technologies behind Web Service and how standard web servers together with a few standardized protocols provide a mechanism for server-to-server communication. The last part covering Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) contained a lot of news for me. These EAI-products works like enterprise hubs for integration efforts and makes it possible to handle large-scale integration projects where just Web Services would render “integration spagetti”. A new flavour of these products are Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) which also looks very promising.