Service-oriented architectures as a vehicle for ICT in developing countries: an awareness campaign

Abstract

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is one of the ways to build applications today. Indeed current applications of SOA type are an aggregation of several smaller applications. Such applications are synonymous with Web 2.0. The cost of consuming and using existing SOA services is much lower than establishing a new infrastructure to provide the same services and there exists free and open source services. Such a technology is appropriate for developing countries where technical and financial resources to setup and support ICTs are severely constrained. Therefore we organized a contest to create awareness about SOA as alternative application development strategy and to expose university students in Uganda to SOA technologies. In this paper we discuss the SOA contest and we give lessons learned from the SOA awareness as a whole.