Teaching and Using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in an Academic Environment

This paper reports on the activities and results from the 4^th International Symposium on Software Engineering Course Projects (SWECP 2007), which was held on October 25, 2007 in Toronto, Canada as part of the IBM GASCON 2007 conference. The symposium focused on lessons learned from teaching and using service-oriented architecture (SOA) in an academic context. There are many challenges inherent in teaching the central tenets of SOA from a systems perspective to a diverse group of students. There are also many practical problems related to experimenting with the underlying technologies such as Web services in course projects. Commented summaries from two invited presentations are used to illustrate some of these issues.