Well done to the Newcastle team of students and to Aad van Moorsel for managing/supervising this fantastic effort.

Back in January, I posted an entry about the IEEE Service Computing Contest (SCContest 2006). A team was formed and only in few months the students delivered with Aad providing excellent direction. Jim and I were monitoring their progress via the mailing list which was set up but did not have to do/say much. The guys were fantastic, as if building service-oriented systems was natural to them (and there is something in there very Web/AJAX-like too :-). They found a problem, they discussed the design and the approach, they architected a solution, and finally built the system (unfortunately the system is down at the moment but Chris is looking at the problem). What I really liked was the fact that they didn’t just want to deliver a working system but they also tried to attack research issues, effectively making the project a research effort as well, rather just an engineering challenge. They addressed issues related to service-oriented design, security, and proofs of messaging contracts. I was seriously impressed. They even used SSDL to model the interactions between the services. Excellent stuff.

There is going to be a paper at the SCC 06 conference where the best 3 teams amongst the finalists will be announced. There is already a Computing Science Technical Report available (Secure and Provable Service Support for Human Intensive Real-Estate Processes) which contains all the information and will give you a rough idea of what was done. The paper is more polished and will be found at the proceedings of the SCC 06 conference.

Well done to the students (in no particular order): Emerson Ribeiro de Mello, Philippe Reinecke, and Chris Smith. Also, big cheers to Aad van Moorsel for driving the project.