Learning it's lesson, this year Sun put on NetBeans Software Day in a very large room in Moscone Center -- a room that held perhaps upwards of 1000 people. As Goldilocks said at the end of her sojourn through the bears' house -- just right! As I prepared to listen to Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Sun EVP Rich Green present the opening session for NetBeans Software Day prior to the 2007 JavaOne Conference, I briefly scanned the crowd. The room was full, but I saw no one standing.
This large and enthusiastic audience gives testament to the fact that there's a large NetBeans developer community out there, and it's growing. In fact, it's that community and the critical role that it plays in the evolution of NetBeans that was the substance of Schwartz and Green's talk. Well actually not a talk, but rather a Q&A session.
Calling himself and Green, "click and clack", Schwartz said that he didn't have a prepared script, so instead he and Green decided to do a Q&A session. Initially Schwartz peppered Green with questions and Green returned serve. Then Green returned the favor and posed questions to his boss.
One thing that came up repeatedly in the Q&As was how important open sourcing and community involvement are to Sun. Schwartz mentioned a number of times that Sun is now the largest open-source code provider in the world. And standing square in the middle of that open sourcing is the developer community. Schwartz said that "we're trying hard to work with the community, be part of the community, and work in the community."
Significantly, that community is driving innovation -- particularly in making things easier for developers. In fact, one of the interesting questions that Schwartz posed was ""where did we go wrong with Java?" That's not to say that Java really did go wrong. Green began his answer with "Java has been a remarkable success story." However he did go on to say that "there are weak points." One of those weak points is that for many developers the language can be difficult. Schwartz chided "So Java is too hard?" Green responded that yes, a lot of developers are looking for something that "speaks to them." And it's the community that is taking the lead in tools like NetBeans to make them "speak to people." Green underscored the fact that the involvement of the community makes for more richness yet more simplicity.
Schwartz and Green also spent a bit of time discussing the basic dialectic in open sourcing. Schwartz said that there are two views regarding open-source code. One view is that code should be open, free, and not subject to litigation. The other view is that the only way to protect code from forking is that it should be controlled by a single company that can be trusted. Schwartz said that the people who hold the first view will likely win out.
Another interesting element of the open source universe is compensation for content providers. Schwartz and Green stressed that it's unsustainable and unfair for folks who contribute innovative content not to get compensated for their efforts. The days of folks contributing their content so that a web-site-owning company can make large amounts of "coin" on it are waning. Green added that "as the largest open-source company in the world, we want to look into how to share the wealth."
Although they said nothing specific, both Schwartz and Green intimated that there will be some announcements upcoming that address this situation. In fact, expect lots of things to come from Sun regarding open source and its evolution. Schwartz said "for me open source was step 1. Steps 2, 3, and 4 will get more interesting technically, sociologically, and economically."
The session ended with a question from the audience that brought a somewhat humorous, and perhaps factual, response from Schwartz:
Q: Could you comment on the fact that Eclipse has more market share than NetBeans?
A: They might have more market share, but our developers have more fun!
Schwartz added: "I call on all Eclipse developers to try NetBeans. You'll have a better day."
]]>Even the welcoming session for this event led by Joseph Ottinger, Editor-in-chief of TheServerSide.com, and Nitin Bharti, Editorial Director, gave me some interesting insights. They took an instant audience poll of a few things related to the audience's use of enterprise tools and technologies. A keypad was available in front of each person in the audience to vote. One question was "What tools do you use most?" The choices included Sun Studio, NetBeans, IBM Rational Application, Eclipse, and some others. It wasn't surprising to me that Eclipse won the vote. But what surprised me was by how much. Eclipse had more than twice as many votes as the other choices. I realize that NetBeans is gaining vis-a-vis Eclipse in mindshare and usage, but at least for this audience Eclipse is still king. Another question was "What tasks have you begun investigating?" Here the choices included Java EE 5, Java SE 5, Solaris DTtrace, and some others. AJAX got the biggest vote here with Java EE 5 and Java SE 5 running second and third.
I liked this instant polling approach. This is something that might be worthwhile to do at the JavaOne Conference.
]]> The welcoming segment was followed by a keynote given by Eric Gamma. Gamma is famous in software engineering circles for being one of the "Gang of Four" authors who wrote the canonical computer science textbook "Design Patterns". Gamma's group at IBM Rational led the design of Eclipse. Gamma devoted his talk to some of the principles that made Eclipse a success. Although there were quite a number of principles cited, the one that stuck in my mind was "Operate like a village" (not to be confused with Hillary Clinton's mantra "It takes a village to raise a child."). In the same sense that in a small village everybody knows everyone else and what they're doing, a project that operates like a village is totally transparent and interacts with customers frequently. Gamma calls this open, transparent development.Gamma is now working on a new project called Jazz. Jazz is "a joint project between IBM Rational and IBM Research to build a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for seamlessly integrating tasks across the software lifecycle." What this project is about is distributed collaborative software development. Right now the project involves 50 developers spread across 5 sites.
It wasn't clear to me whether the result of this effort will be a "product" (albeit open-source), a technology, a methodology, or all of these things. Unfortunately, Gamma's network connection wasn't working, so he couldn't demonstrate what they've done/built so far.
One interesting the Jazz team found is that in developing software you can't collaborate closely all the time. When the project started the idea was for everyone to work on the same build. But this total collaboration didn't work well. People were getting in each other's way. So the approach evolved to a hybrid where the entire team was split into individual teams. Each team owned a component and owned their own process. Tools control the collaboration of the individual teams. Interestingly, Jazz recognizes each team's individual process and is able to blend everything together into a workable overall process. If you're interested, you can find out more about the Jazz project at http://jazz.net.
This event is off to a good start. I've learned a bit and hopefully will learn a lot more. Next stop: a session titled "Ajax and JavaScript: Down and Dirty."
]]>O.K. O.K., the second of those items seems pretty grouchy. Actually I did pick up some interesting things, some of which came in a technical talk, enticing titled " Ajax and JavaScript: Down and Dirty." What I expected here was a heavy duty technical talk -- delving deep into code. Indeed there were some code examples, but I found the talk high level enough to come way with some general notions about how to effectively develop Ajax applications.
The speaker for this session was Justin Gehtland. Justin is the co-founder of a consultancy called Relevance, the author of several books, an in-demand speaker, and also the developer of an open-source development framework called Streamlined.
Justin mentioned a number of things that were particularly interesting to me. Some of them are:
Yup -- he used the dreaded double negative in that statement, but Gehtland made an excellent point. If you don't have the right tools for developing Ajax apps, you're not going to do Ajax apps -- at least not well or quickly. Gehtland said that Firefox is a must-have tool (at least for him) " because it has the best 'toys' for developers." Gehtland said that IE is catching up, but other tools such as Safari are nowhere close. And what are those toys? Gehtland listed these:
Gehtland also spent a good amount of time in this talk covering the three things that can be sent back across the wire in response to a JavaScript request: HTML, structured data such as JSON, and JavaScript. He also discussed when to use each of these approaches and why.
]]> I thought this was a very good talk and Gehtland was a very good speaker. I think I'll do a web search and see if I can find some other pearls of Ajax-JavaScript wisdom from Mr. Gehtland.Now for the Soviet breadline ... After Gehtland's talk, the 150+ folks attending the session piled into the hallway to hit the buffet lunch (which BTW was sponsored by Sun). Two buffet tables awaited. What also awaited were two lines of more than 350 people. It almost seemed like there were more people in the lunch lines than attended the sessions. Maybe folks registered for the conference just for the food (not!). Needless to say, it took me about half an hour to get to the food. I would have chucked the idea and gone to a food vendor, but I got into an interesting conversation with someone waiting in line next to me. It seems he's a development manager for a software company. One of the interesting things he told me was that that he used to go to JavaOne Conferences, but he found that they got too big. Bigness led to some logistical problems. He said that unless you got a hotel room near the sessions you wanted to attend you sometimes found that you couldn't get to them on time. I hadn't heard this before. I don't know if this is a real problem or not. Although with the growing number of registrants to the JavaOne Conference in recent years, this might be an issue that needs to be addressed by the folks who run this year's Conference.
]]>What I'd like to talk about here is an excellent (I thought) lunchtime panel discussion that focused on the business side of open source.
]]> O.K. what do you think of when I say "open source"? You might say something like "community" or " collaboration". If you're like me, you'd probably also say "free". So if it's free -- and most open source code is indeed free -- how can you make a business, that is, a money-making business out of it? The answer is through training, consulting, and support services. That's what was stated pretty much across the board by the five panelists in the Open Source panel: Bob McWhirter of JBoss/Red Hat, Neelan Choski or Interface 21, Brian Kim, of Liferay, Joaquin Ruiz of SpikeSource, and John Newton of Alfresco. The discussion was led by Joseph Ottinger, TheServerSide.com's Editor-in-Chief. Kim noted that "there's a definitely an association between open source and community, but when things break down people start looking for professional help, training, and service." So that's where the sweet spot is for these open source companies.Not every company represented on the panel has the same business model for their open source business or had the same reasons for going to an open source model. Newton said that Alfresco went open source because the company is headquartered in the U.K. and it simply was a lot easier starting a software business in Europe with open source software than with closed source. Kim, by comparison, said that Liferay started out as a project and then became a product. However all these companies share some of the same problems.
Perhaps the biggest problem they face is in the area of licensing. A number of these companies make their open source sofware available through the GNU General Public License (GPL). I'm not very knowledgeable about software licensing so I did a little research and found the following in Wikipedia:
The GNU Lesser General Public License (formerly the GNU Library General Public License) is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation. It was designed as a compromise between the strong-copyleft GNU General Public License and simple permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License. The GNU Lesser General Public License was written in 1991 (and updated in 1999) by Richard Stallman, with legal advice from Eben Moglen.
Apparently many companies in the open source software business are studying the latest draft of the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and it's scaring some of them because they think it's not protective enough. Another angle to this mentioned by someone in the audience: some of the prospective clients of design and development shops won't use open source software because they think the licensing is not protective enough of them. There are various nuances to this licensing/protection issue. For instance, Newton said that indemnification is something that's very important to Alfresco. Indemnification protects their customers if someone comes after them for patent infringement.
Documentation also appears to be an issue in this niche. There is a spectrum of approaches that open source businesses take regarding documentation. Some companies such as JBoss don't spend resources on documentation. Their stance is that Open Source is a communal effort and it's up to the community to initiate the documentation and make it available to others. Alfresco makes their documentation available only to people who give them details on how they plan to use the product. Choksi said that Interface21 wants to stimulate the community as much as possible to use their product, so they make all of their documentation available. So too does Liferay. Kim said that "There's a common misconception that Open Source companies are holding documentation hostage. That's not true."Liferay makes all of its documentation available on the Web and turns to the community to add to it. Ruiz added that "It all depends on how you see documentation. Is it core or content? If it's content, you'll want to share it. You'll want to stimulate the community as much as possible to use the product and so you'll make the documentation available. If you see it as core, you won't."
There were a number of other interesting issues discussed during this session, one of them being trademarking. For instance, if a company contributes code to Hibernate, can they sell their training services as "Hibernate training"? McWhirter was clear that the Hibernate project is trademarked. JBoss/Red Hat owns the name "Hibernate".
Perhaps the most interesting question that came up during the session was the one that ended the session: "How much money is being made in the Open Source business?" The panelists responded that there are not a lot of good examples right now to quantify this. JBoss/Red Hat is probably the best example. However McWhirter didn't give any profit figures. Newton did say that Alresco is not profitable right now only because they're expanding their sales and marketing staff. He did say that they have 250 customers after their first year of operation and a profitable OEM business.
The key to profitability in the Open Source business appears to be the same as for the closed source business. Kim phrased it as follows: "Listen to your customers and make sure you give them what they expect."
]]>Karen focused a lot of her talk on Sun's strong strides toward openness and its long term commitment to standardization. She noted that last year Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced that everything Sun develops will be open source. I've been very close to some of those open source efforts such as the GlassFish community that's delivered the open source GlassFish Application Server. I'm also aware of the Open JDK community that is working on an open source implementation of the JDK. But I wasn't aware of some of the other open source projects that have been initiated by Sun. Karen mentioned a number of these:
You can find out more about these projects on java.net.
]]> Now you ask what's "SPOT"? After all, it's in the title of this blog? SPOT stands for Small Programmable Object Technology. It's a small (fits in the palm of your hand) wireless sensor device developed by Sun Labs -- you can find out more about SPOT here. And it was the star attraction in a series of demonstrations that Sun evangelist Simon Ritter did after Karen Tegan Padir finished her talk.In the first demo Ritter held a SPOT in his hand and waved it quickly. What appeared in the airspace between the waves was a message that included the words "Sun SPOT." I'm not quite sure what was going on here. Ritter said something about an accelerometer. It seemed like magic to me. Next Ritter demonstrated how the Sun SPOT device could communicate with a remote web service to receive and display a different message. Then Ritter demo'd what I though was really cool. He ran a program that made a colored blip appear in the SPOT's LCD screen, then by tilting the device, he made the blip appear in another SPOT device, as if a colored ball rolled from one SPOT to another.
Ritter did some other interesting demonstrations. One involved SPOT devices mounted wood blocks over wheels. He then used a program to command the cars to chase each other. It worked -- sort of. One car seemed to want to drive off stage. Another went round and round in circles. In another demo Ritter used a SPOT device wrapped in a glove-like apparatus around his hand to control a 3D desktop. The 3D desktop was developed in Sun's Looking Glass project.
Some of these demos were pretty cool. But what's really cool are the potential uses that can come out of sensor based technologies like this one.
]]>Big, Bigger, Biggest
This is a huge show, one that makes the JavaOne Conference seem minuscule. In his show-opening remarks, Gary Shapiro, President and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, said that this year's show has over 140,000 attendees, more than 2700 exhibitors, and a whopping 1.8 million square feet of exhibitor space spread over three giant convention halls. I think a good chunk of the 140,000 plus attendees waited in line on the evening before the official opening of the show to hear Bill Gates give a pre-show keynote. I hoped to be one of them. I arrived over an hour before Gates's talk, only to find that all the vouchers for admission had been given out. The line of folks waiting to get into the session (the lucky voucher holders) seemed endless. Although I didn't get into the talk, I subsequently heard that the "biggie" announcement in the talk was an agreement between Microsoft and Ford Motor Company that will give drivers voice-activated access to text messages and email as well as the ability to make phone calls by voice command.
Convergence Redux
As far as the keynotes I did get into, the first was Shapiro's. His talk was sort of a philosophical overview of the consumer electronics industry -- where it is, and where it's heading. Shapiro said that "for years, we talked about converging products. What defines the 2007 International CES is that it's about the new convergence of content, services, and products." I got confirmation the other day of this "for years" aspect when I listened to a radio interview with the lead technology correspondent for the New York Times. He's been a regular attendee of the CES and said that convergence was the theme for the CES show in 2005, 2004, 2003, ... Note that the CES show began in 1967 -- it's now in its 40th year. Perhaps the folks at CES were hyping convergence even back then. The technology correspondent seemed pretty cynical about this. He mentioned that convergence-driven visions such as the wired home still seem like they're in nerdsville and not something that will be a reality for most people in the near future.
Perhaps the vision of a consumer electronics nirvana like a wired home is still hype, but the appetite for consumer electronics sure isn't. Shapiro said that this year the industry will rack up more than $155 Billion is sales. He also said that 90 of the Fortune 400 richest Americans can attribute their fortune to creating or selling software, hardware, or services related to consumer electronics products.
Shapiro also emphasized that in the drive for convergence, whose objective is to give people access to the content they want when and where they want it, it's important that industry not restrict the technologies that will make that objective a reality. In that regard, Shapiro is involved in the Digital Freedom Campaign, a coalition designed to protect the rights of artists, consumers, and innovators to use digital technology and content.
Shapiro ended his talk by introducing Ed Zander, the Chairman of the Board and CEO of Motorola (and former President and COO of Sun Microsystems).
Low Tech is High Tech
Zander made a decidedly low-tech entrance, riding in from backstage on a yellow retro-looking bicycle. It turned out that the bike was really an example of something new and pretty interesting. Zander mentioned that in riding the bike, he was charging his new MOTOFONE. Later in the talk he explained that in many places in the world being able to charge a cell phone can be difficult, so an alternate means of charging a phone is very attractive. Well, the bike approach is just that. In this case, Zander had a MOTOFONE attached to the handlebars and a dynamo and regulator attached to the pedals. Pedaling the bike charged the phone. This is a low tech way to power a high tech device. Imagine all those bike riders in Calcutta charging their cell phones as they pedal up the equivalent of Main Street. And there are a lot of them - over 135 million cell phone users in India, probably the great bulk of them ride bicycles as a primary means of transportation. Zander said that the number of cell phone users in India is growing by more than 6 million a month! Zander likened it to adding a Denmark's worth of subscribers a month.
Zander also reinforced what Shapiro said earlier about the immense size of the consumer electronics industry. Currently the world grows by an average of 4 births per second, but that's dwarfed by the average of 25 mobile devices that are sold per second.
Demos, Demos, Demos
Highlighting Zander's session were a number of demos that showed a variety of new (or soon to be available) devices and services. These included:
Yahoo Go! on Motorola Handsets. Zander announced that Motorola signed an agreement with Yahoo that brings Yahoo's Yahoo GO! 2.0 application to selected Motorola's handsets. Yahoo Go! is an Internet application that provides an easy-to-use, widget-driven, and personalizable interface to the Internet for mobile phone users. Zander and Yahoo Senior VP Marco Boerries demo'd the interface on a MOTORAZR device showing access to financial information, sports information, and email. He also demo'd a new search capability called One Search. Doing a search through this app on Microsoft brought up a link to Microsoft's home page as well as its current stock price and current news. It also listed a variety of other Microsoft-related items. Yahoo Go! is location aware, so you can click on a "What's Happening in My City" link or widget and get a lot of local information such as a list of local events, local weather, and local traffic information. You can currently download a Beta version of Yahoo Go 2.0. Ultimately it will be prepackaged with a variety of handsets. In addition to preloads on Motorola handsets, the application will be available on about 70 other devices -- Yahoo is aiming for 400 devices by the end of the year.
Leveraging Bluetooth For Music and Photos. Motorola's Senior Director of Multimedia, Chris White, demonstrated a sleek new set of headphones that use bluetooth technology. You no longer need to have headphones connected to the music player. White said that the player can be as far as thirty feet away from the headphones and still work. To this I say "Great!" I love to jog with a music player in my pocket connected to headphones. But it's really a pain when the wires connecting the two unplug (which tends to happen a lot). So I'm really attracted to a device that eliminates the wires. White also showed how this technology on a Motorola phone can be used to send a digital photo to a printer. Again, it's done remotely (up to 30 feet) -- there's no need to connect the phone to the printer. On another topic, White announced a partnership with Motorola and Warner Communication that brings a lot of content related to music, such as music videos and artist biographies, to mobile phones. He also announced a new mobile device called the MOTORIZR Z6 that adds advanced multimedia features to the basic cell phone capability. One of the neat features enables users through Windows Media Player to download and play music from over 200 online music stores. Of added interest to me is that the user interface for this feature is done in Java.
Enterprise Goes Mobile. I don't know about this one. Zander claims that what we'll see over the coming year is handheld devices replacing laptops. To demonstrate this, he brought up Danny Shader the CEO of Good Technologies (what a great name for a tech company!), which was recently acquired by Motorola. It was actually only Shader's second day in the Motorola fold. Shader said that what was formerly known as a cell phone has matured to being a "full powered multimedia computer for the enterprise." He demonstrated this by running various enterprise apps such as email, spreadsheet, and calendar on a Motorola Que device. He also demo'd an order management system. Two really nice aspects of these demos are that they don't require the user to bring up VPN to run behind a firewall and they don't require reauthentication to run multiple apps. Firewall setup and authentication are handled by the infrastructure. Also the apps take advantage of the device's phone capabilities. For instance clicking on a name in an app can automatically dial that person's phone number. Everything worked (of course), but all I kept thinking about was that teeny weeny screen on the device. I'd need to get a set of magnifying glasses to read my email, let alone to see individual cells in a spreadsheet.
Home Again. Although earlier in this blog I mentioned the cynicism surrounding pronouncements about the wired home, I have to admit that some of the things that Motorola is doing in home-based electronics seem pretty exciting -- perhaps because I spend so much of my "quality time" in front of the T.V. Dan Moloney, Motorola's President of Connected Home Solutions showed off a few of these things. One, called program restart technology, allows you to start a T.V. program from the beginning even if the program is further along in real time. (Isn't that what TIVO or a DVR does?) Another -- one that I'm really excited about -- allows you to stream a recorded video from one T.V. to another. So if you're watching an episode of Desperate Housewives that you recorded the other night and it's time to eat dinner, you can move to the kitchen and watch while you're eating. Last but not least, is a feature that allows you to remotely program your T.V. recording device from a handheld device -- in this case, Moloney did it from a Motorola Razor phone. My wife loved this feature when I told her about it.
There was a lot of stuff in this session, a lot of it pretty interesting (at least to me). I get the sense that these announcements are pretty indicative of the industry. If I had the time to sit in on sessions by other cell phone makers, T.V. manufacturers, or media content producers I bet I'd see and hear similar things. Alas, I didn't have the time.
]]>In his talk, Garrett, cited some of the characteristics that distinguish the new generation of web applications. These characteristics include:
Garrett said that people often ask him what technologies constitute Ajax. He answers that it's not really a set of technlogies. In fact, many of the technologies that people associate with Ajax will likely be supplanted by other technologies. Instead Ajax is a design pattern, one that gets us away from the old web publishing model to a new asynchronous interaction model of the web.
Calling Ajax "our manifest destiny as an industry," Garrett said that Ajax enables the responsiveness that was previously available only in desktop applications. Furthermore, Ajax requires no compromises in terms of browser features or environmental setup. Garrett also said that one of the great things about Ajax is that you can incrementally migrate web applications to it, sprinkling in Ajax functionality a little at a time in the places that it makes most sense.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the talk was Garrett's answer to the question "What is the highest compliment that someone can give a product?" His answer: "cool!" He then went on to delve into what makes a product cool by looking at Apple's iPod. Garret underscored that what makes the iPod a success is its simplicity and attention to the user's experience. "We get ourselves into trouble when we design from the inside out." By that he meant that problems arise when technologies and features drive a product's design and the user's experience is only a secondary consideration. The successful cool products are the ones that start with the user's experiences and use it to inform the selection of technologies and features.
So be cool.
]]>This is not a heavily attended conference. Usually the opening keynote gives you a good idea of the total number of attendees. I guessed there were approximately 400-500 people in the room (which sat more than twice that much). I guess the way to look at this is that Web 2.0/Ajax is still in an emerging stage of development, so expecting a huge turnout is probably unrealistic.
So far I sat in on two sessions. The first was a keynote given by Scott Dietzen, President and CTO of Zimbra. The keynote was titled "Lessons Learned Building a 100+KLOC Ajax Application." The second was a developer session given by John Crupi titled "Ajax: Putting a Face on SOA."
The biggest impression I got at these sessions is that mashups are the really big deal (at least right now) in the Ajax/Web 2.0 world. Both Dietzen and Crupi punctuated their talks with some snazzy demos that seemlessly mashed up a variety of services into a front end interface. Dietzen's was an email application that enabled things like mousing over a sender's name to get further information about the sender, or previewing a URL in an email without having to download the page, or clicking on a plane's flight number in an email and getting flight tracking information.
Crupi's demo was a defense department/intelligence application that allowed users to bring in services to be mashed up on demand.
While Ditezen's theme was essentially how to enrich the user exerience with mashups. Crupi took more of an enterprise view of things. He noted that doing mashups is relatively easy to do "when you own the system." But it's not easy when you want to mashup a variety of services from different companies. He noted that companies want to maintain the sort of governance, security, and performance that they have for traditional apps. Accomplishing that is not easy in an Ajax app -- although his app demonstrated that it can be done (being a defense department app, it obviously had a lot of security protections built in).
Some other interesting (at least to me) tidbits that I picked up so far from these sessions, include:
I thought this was a pretty good session. One refreshing thing I heard from Malks is that he and Alur conceived of the session because they were confused by a lot of the newly emerging terminology and ideas related to Web 2.0, web services, and the like. In fact, they kept a slide up during the entire session that showed many of the buzz words, like "mashup", and acroynms that architects and developers inevitably sprinkle into their talk these days. It's comforting to know that I'm not the only one confused by a lot of this.
This was a question and answer session. Some of the questions came from Alur and Malks, some from the audience. Here are some of the Q&As I found particularly interesting. Note that I can't write fast and my memory ain't what it used to be. So what I've recorded is incomplete at best and perhaps incorrect at points.
Malks: What do you think is the relevance of Web 2.0 to your business?
Hinchcliffe: What we're really seeing in Web 2.0 is the 2-way web, where people are contributing as much content as they're consuming. It's a social networking phenomenon.
McClanahan: Web 2.0 is a lot of technologies that we've had for years but that are now coming into general use.
Johnson: To me, the interesting thing about Web 2.0 is that it's finally happening. I've worked for clients like the Financial Times who moved in the late 90s to a highly interactive, highly JavaScript-driven site. But by 2000 they pushed back to a pretty static site. They were back to where they were in the early 90s. So it's good to see that the push for interactivity has returned.
Audience: What about the move to easier, lightweight frameworks?
Hinchcliffe: What we have to deal with right now is different abstractions: Java, XML, SQL, ... The move to a single abstraction such as Ruby on Rails is good.
McClanahan: We haven't matured as much on the client side as on the server side.
Malks: What is Sabre doing to open up some of it applications as web services?
MacDonald: We've made more than 60 applications available as web services. But we're finding that people are using them in unintended ways, ways that the services were never intended for. So that's exposing some problems.
Malks: Are we at the point yet where our companies can completely model their business with an object model?
Johnson: It's difficult because most business have everything. One client I work with has 43 seperate systems based on 9 radically different technologies.
Audience: What advice would you give a J2EE developer who wants to develop Web 2.0 applications?
Hinchcliffe: Design for unexpected uses.
]]>O.K. so much for initial thoughts. What I really wanted to get out of this was a better understanding of what SCA is. The abstract for this session said that the session would cover "how the Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO) form the basis of a cross-language and cross-technology representation of service components and the data exchanged between those components for SOA-based applications." I translate that as "we'll tell you what SCA and it's data partner SCO are and how they fit into SOA." I don't know how or why, but somehow I'd been led to believe that SCA was somehow in competition with the architecture I envision what I think of SOA, an architecture that's built on a foundation of specific protocols and web services technologies.
What I think I learned in this session is that SCA is essentially technology agnostic. In fact the main speaker in the session, IBM Distinguished Engineer, Rob High, who's on the team working on the SCA spec with folks from BEA, Oracle, and SAP, painted a mental picture that SCA is all about building SOA at a much higher level. (Had a funny thought there -- High talking about thinking "High"er.) High said that "we tend to think about SOA as a technology. But we've got to think about it as an alignment between business goals and IT." High said that SOA is really a style of building an enterprise architecture that's derived from business design. In other words, the goal of SOA is to automate a company's business processes so that it can meet its business goals and flexibly respond to changing business goals and needs. It's not about the technologies and languages that are used to implement SOA.
So what's SCA and SOA? High did go over (too quickly for me to grasp in any real sense) some of the terminology and concepts that underlie SCA and SOA. I did pull the following definition off of one slide in High's presentation:
Service Component Architecture: A specification which describes a model for building applications and systems using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
Hmmm, seems sort of circular. So I'm going with the thought that SCA is an architecture that's driven by the underlying processes of a business. One thing I did get a better insight into in this session -- something that's not really specific to SCA or SOA -- is what Web 2.0 is really about. I've yet to see a really cogent definition of what Web 2.0 is. High said that "Web 2.0 expresses a desire to enable the truly ad hoc -- the ability on the Web to do what I want and need to do without the constraints of system conformance. It's all about dynamic interaction and social networking on the Web."
There was a question and answer session at the end of the talk. High invited SCA team representatives from BEA and Oracle to join him in answering the questions. Dissapointingly (at least for someone who's hoping that people are really interested in SOA) about three fourths of the audience left before the first question was asked. My take based on the answers to some of the questions is that the SCA spec is still far from finished. Major areas still need to be addressed such as how services implemented as enterpise beans fit within the architecture. I was also a little bothered by the vagueness of some of the answers. For instance, someone asked how to identify the "real" services in a legacy application. The answer given was essentially that it's difficult and requires the use of business modeling tools and people with business expertise. Another asked about the status of BPELJ (BPEL for Java technology). The answer was that BPELJ is in whitepaper stage and no spec yet exists for it.
I guess I came away from this session with some notions about what SCA is but not really all that clear of an idea. I guess I'll have to do some research on it.
]]>As someone who's had to live with the clumsy coding that it takes to build a web service and a web service app, and also someone who pretty regularly looks at (pardon the expression) SOA middleware, what a relief it is to see web services built through well-designed wizards and drag and drop components, visual orchestration tools, and features that actually help you understand ridiculously complex schemas. What will they think of next?
Let me tell you, if you're an enterprise app developer, and you haven't tried NetBeans 5.5, you should. As Ludo Champenois, the web services demo presenter at NetBeans Day said, "This ain't your father's IDE."
]]>Another thing I'm looking forward to is picking up interesting quotes from some of the Java "heavyweights." A few months ago I attended TheServerSide Symposium here in Vegas. Here are some of the more interesting quotes I heard:
Many of the same players who were at the TSS Symposium will also make appearances at J1. I'll keep my ears open wide and try to capture any of the more interesting things they say. If you hear a quote that sounds particularly interesting share it here.]]>
I always find it interesting to learn how people get exposed to their passions. In Bill Burke's case, his exposure to JBoss was pretty much driven by desperation. Burke, who was the speaker for the session "The JBoss Kernel: Plug and Play J2EE," was working for a startup the was in the process of going belly up. Money was drying up, and the company lost its license to the proprietary app server it was using. Someone in the comopany told Burke "I think there's some freeware/shareware out there called JBoss. Why don't you look at it?" Burke did and was soon hooked. He got even more entrenched into JBoss a bit later, when Marc Fleury, JBoss's CEO, asked him if he wanted to take the "red pill." (Those of you who've seen the Matrix movies know what taking the red pill means. For those who don't, let's say that it gives you a fresh and unobstructed view of reality.) Fast forward a bit, and now Burke is the Chief Architect for JBoss.
The reason most folks turn to JBoss in pretty much the same reason Burke turned to it. No, they're not all working for dying companies that are desperate, rather, they're all interested in an open source Java application server. The great thing about an open source app server is that you can extend it in ways that you need. One example of this is JBoss's use of interceptors to extend MBean services. (JBoss is built on top of the JMX architecture, and all JBoss services are MBeans.) Interceptors are a very flexible means of incorporating new behavior into applications deployed on the apps server. For example, Burke talked about a defense contractor that needed to use a proprietary security protocol in its applications on JBoss. Using interceptors on both the client and the server, the company was able to invoke the protocol when they needed.
MBeans also gives JBoss a way to expose metadata about services so that it's easy to write tools that access this metadata. Burke showed a console tool that did just that.
Dunno if I've quite got this right, but during Burke's talk, it did appear that JBoss can even extend annotations. For example, Burke showed an annotation that invokes EJB methods in a background thread. Burke then showed how a constraint can be put on the invocation such that only void methods will be run in the background (I think).
... and speaking of annotations, that leads me to the second session I attended. In this one, Gavin King, the founder of the Hibernate project spoke about some of the new things in Hibernate 3.0 (which has been available for a few months, and is now considered stable enough for production use). He also talked about some things planned for 3.1. Hibernate is open source object/relational mapping service for Java. Long separate from EJB, Hibernate and EJB forces are now coming together. In fact, King is on the EJB 3.0 expert group (as is Burke), and Hibernate fetures are making their way into EJB 3.0
One thing to be aware of is that there's lots of stuff going on in the Hibernate project. King showed six different subprojects that are in progress. One is a subproject on Hibernate annotations, another is on Hibernate-specific extensions such as constraints.
King spent most of his talk on identifying some of the major problems in object/relational mapping that Hibernate 3.0 and 3.1 try to address. For example, there are problems in inheritance mappings between object and relational models. Object models often include more information about subtype associations than relational database models (case in point: you can have an EffectiveDated abstract superclass in an object model, but you can't have an EFFECTIVE_DATED table). However, sometimes the relational model has subtyping that cannot be expressed in an object model (for instance, an object can only have one type, a relational database can have multiple types).
One of the new features in Hibernate 3.0 that King highlighted (and called "the coolest thing") is filtering. This feature allows a user to see temporal, regional, permissioned data -- in other words, data that's valid for a particular point in time, or data that the user has permission to see only for a particular region. Filter conditions are defined as SQL fragments in a mapping document, and can be applied cumulatively. King said that what's nice about this feature is that it turns messy dynamic queries (that is, queries where you have lots of join conditions) into a simple declarations.
For Hibernate 3.1, King highlighted some extensions to bulk update/delete, a new StatelessSession streaming API (that offers a more JDBC approach to streaming data into and out of a database), and "break" processing for ScrollableResults.
To find out more about these features, and what's going on in Hibernate, see http://www.hibernate.org/.
Both of these sessions were very well attended (a large room filled with lots of folks), but King's was pretty much standing room only. So I guess one could say that more folks came out of "Hibernateion" for the second talk. ;-)
]]>The central presenter for this session was T.N. Subramaniam, Director of Technology for RouteOne LLC, a credit aggregation management company for the auto industry. RouteOne brings together credit information that can be accessed by auto dearships in auto financing applications. T.N. said that RouteOne is one of the largest web service providers in the world. In this talk he focused on an SOA-based credit aggregation system that RouteOne implemented. He did an overview of the solution. He also covered the technology options that were available, and why RouteOne chose a particular option. For example, for B2B message binding, they use Document/literal and RPC/literal for reasons such as WS-I compliance. For XML security, they use XML-DSig because it provides for message authentication, message integrity, and message non-repudiation in a standard way.
Other presenters for this talk were Ashesh Badani, Sun's Group Marketing Manager for SOA, and Ashok Mollin, an Enterpise Architect at Sun. Ashesh essentially was the M.C., and Ashock did a follow-up, best practices, summary.
While the presentation of RouteOne's solution and their design choices were interesting, I found what RouteOne learned from this experience about implementing an SOA the most interesting part of the talk. Ashok characterized this knowledge gained as "Pragmatic SOA." Here are the SOA kernels of knowledge that came out of this experience:
T.N. ended the talk by underscoring that this is still a work in progress. He advised "Keep learning, this is not finished."
I think a lot of folks who are interested in SOA are waiting for case studies like this so that they don't have to be "guinea pigs." One of the most reasuring things I heard in this session is that RouteOne was pleasantly surprised as to how many of their decisions actually worked well. So maybe being a guinea pig in this stage of SOA maturation isn't that much of a risk. In any case, the more case studies like this, the more best practices on the books, the better and faster the promise of SOA will turn into reality.
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