Innolocity

Link of the Month - The best Zoom feature ever

2009-12-16T04:34:00.002Z

The frontend for many mass-customization, product-configurators is based on Adobe Flash/Flex, but as we all know, a fool with a tool is still a ... and therefore there are lots of examples out there where the design and implementation of the UI leaves "room for improvement".

At the same there are also examples of very clever and thought-through UI design/implementation. One example in this category is the website for the movie "Creation". I really like the way they implemented the Zoom feature (and the moving bug :)).

Check it out.

Mass-customization delivered - Back to the roots ...

2009-12-15T16:50:00.004Z

20 years ago I started my career as a Technical Project Manager/Lead Architect for EDS and was working on Bill-of-Material solutions for the Automotive Industry (e.g. Opel).

During my self-declared summer-sabbatical, I was musing over what I want to do next and felt that (if possible) I would like to work again in a business domain and (if possible) maybe (again) in manufacturing.

I am happy to report that it worked out just fine!

A couple of month ago I was approached by Brandvis Ltd and they were looking for a Chief Architect with manufacturing background to help them with the implementation of their next-generation mass-customization platform. For the time being the platform is targeted at the garment industry (or to be precise at high-visible, high-performance, technical workwear or Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)). The Brandvis Software Solution allows you to customize these garments and (if necessary) certify the garments (in real-time) against the relevant standards.

The software that is behind the solution needs to be tightly integrated with underlying Bill-of-Material information and also with the Supply-Chain that is driving the manufacturing process. What we (Brandvis) have right now is a good start, but lots remains to be done. I am really looking forward to the adventure of building this.

Ultimately/Potentially the Brandvis Solution might evolve into a general-purpose solution to deliver on the promises of the holy-grail of manufacturing: the implementation of a general-purpose mass-customization solution.

Mass-customization is a very interesting and exciting concept and you can expect that I will start to talk about it more on this blog.

Effective Android - Using Apache CXF to access SOAP services

2009-09-22T07:28:00.003+01:00

A year ago I developed a small set of demos to show how to access SOAP services from the iPhone. To do this I used a very interesting feature of Apache CXF: The ability to generate a complete JavaScript client-side SOAP-stack on the fly.

I just finished an update/upgrade of this demo to show that it also works with the Android Phone. I also ported it to maven, means installing, building and running the demo is much easier now. The source code and the maven build environment is available for download and here is the README.

Enjoy :).

Social Networking - Updating your status: all or nothing?

2009-09-17T08:05:00.005+01:00

Yesterday I was stumbling over a Facebook status update from Oisin Hurley ...

Oisin Hurley is starting to get a bit irritated with people that unselectively duplicate their twitter stream to their Facebook status. They're different interactions, people.

This is an interesting observation and creates a bigger question: where do we go with this social-networking, micro-blogging, status-update thingy?

Initially it was easy: there was just/only twitter and this was the place to do micro-blogging and status-updates, but by now all social-networking sites (Facebook, Linked-In, XING, Plaxo, Bebo, ...) have a similar feature. On top of that all major IM platforms (AIM, MSN, Skype, ...) by now also feature a status-update feature, means as a user you are between a rock and a hard place: you either update them all at once (and "over-communicate") or you update them separately (and spend a lot of time on it).

In my case my social networks are not segmented by type/kind or friend, means it is not that all my personal friends are on Facebook and my business friends are on Twitter. The segmentation is more on the tools side. Some of my friends use Facebook (only), some use Twitter (only) and some use both. Looking at it from this point of view I want to send my micro-blog entries/status updates to both or even all of of my social-networking sites (this is what Barack Obama is doing :)).

Another way to look at it is maybe a segmentation by content type, means there are probably different kind of messages: more private/personal mood-messages/updates (Roland is happy. Just started a rocket with Alexandros.) , more professional micro-blog entries (Roland is working to make Lightsabre run on Android), more factual statements (e.g. a location) (Roland is in Dublin), ... and so on. Question is ... do these content types somehow map themselves to different sites/tools? I am not really sure about this, because currently people do not pick their social networking sites/tools on purpose or by brand (e.g. Facebook is the social-network for friends and Twitter is the social-network for news, professional live and marketing), means one content type might be interesting for half the people on my Facebook network and half the people on my Twitter network.

That kind of leads me to a (suggested) conclusion: the solution is not to send certain updates only to one site or the other. The solution is to create groups of people in every network and have tools which allow you to send certain messages to these groups on your networks.

Any other thoughts? Suggestions?

Effective Mac - Using TimeMachine Part II or Why Restore was greyed out?

2009-09-12T18:38:00.004+01:00

It happened again!!! Another HD crash. A year ago I lost my original 160GB drive and replaced it with a 250GB drive. Now this one failed only 12 month later. I am not sure what is happening here, but I do not feel that I "mishandle" my MacBook in a way that would explain this rate of failure. Let me know, what your experience is. Are MacBooks DiskEaters?

Anyway ... in any case I had a chance to see, if my new backup strategy is better than my old one. You might remember (or not :)) that last year I found out that you have to use TimeMachine the "right way", if you want to have a pleasant restore experience.

This time around I booted from the Installation CD, went to Utilities and selected "Restore System from Backup ...". Imagine my surprise when I was confronted with a selection of snapshots until 2 month ago (and I was sure that the last backup was from Sep., 03rd), but I figured "Hey, better *something* from mid of May than nothing and maybe I can restore more files using the TimeMachine application after the initial restore" and of we go ...

6 hours later my system is restored and I start the TimeMachine application and surprise (again :)) I can see all me backups until Sep., 03rd, but all backups between mid of May and Sep., 03rd are greyed out (including the Restore button). Weird and frustrating. What the hell did I do to make all of these backups "un-restoreable"?

After an hour of investigation I found the problem: Mid of may I renamed the disk in the MacBook from "Macintosh HD" to "Roland's HD". Trivial, simple change, nothing to think about, nothing to worry about and TimeMachine continues to back up as normal, but will create a new backup set with the new volume name.

What is not really immediately obvious is that you can restore from various backup sets, when you run "Restore System from Backup ...". After you have selected the disk to restore from, there is a drop-down box at the top of the screen, that will allow you to select a backup set (in case you have more than one on the disk) and the next screen will then display all snapshots in that set, means the solution to my problem was to select the "Roland's HD" set and voila ... suddenly the snapshots between mid of May and Sep., 03rd are displayed.

After another 6 hours I was in pretty good shape and I now like TimeMachine even more than before.

BTW, ... if you are in Dublin and need help with your Mac I recommend the guys from the MacShop at Merrion Square. Good, competent, fast. This is how it should be.

ACCU 2009 - Slides are available

2009-06-20T11:22:00.003+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I attended ACCU 2009 to deliver a talk on "RESTful Services and Distributed OSGi - Friends or Foes" and "AJAX for Mobile Devices - Using Apache Projects to get the job done". The conference was very well organized (thanks Giovanni) and took place in the beautiful city of Oxford. The format (keynote presentations and smaller breakout sessions) allowed for a good mix of thought-provoking presentations and good discussions. The audience was made up from very-experienced software-engineers and no-BS project-mangers.

My most favorite presentation/keynote was delivered by Linda Rising (The Benefits of Abstraction in Patterns). She talked about the potential of patterns going beyond the ability to put structure into the domain of software engineering.

I am looking forward to learn about the agenda for next year.

Street Performance World Championship - a non-technical blog post

2009-06-19T18:46:00.000+01:00

Sorry - this is a non-technical blog post. If you are not interested in having a good time, stop reading now. Otherwise ...

I am on the LUAS on the way home from the Street Performance World Championship in Dublin.

All of the performances are good/funny, but my personal favorite are Alakazam and Mr. Toons.

Go and check it out. It is worth-while the time.

Smart Energy - let's bring Smart Meters, Smart Grid, Micro Grid and the software behind it together

2009-06-18T12:12:00.001+01:00

A year ago I had a couple of pints with Dan Salt (Chief Software Architect at GE Energy) and we discussed the current state of affairs with respect to IT and Software Architectures/Solutions in the Energy/Utility sector. As a result I started to develop an interest in Smart Meter (just watch the first 5 min), Smart Grid, Micro Grid and Grid 2.0 concepts/solutions.

Here is a summary of the problems as I see them ...

we need to become more intelligent about how to consume energy
we need to become more intelligent about how to produce energy
and we need to become more intelligent about how to distribute/store energy

The main focus of this blog entry is on the first bullet point, but I also quickly want to talk about the second and third bullet. Becoming more intelligent about producing, distributing and storing energy and that means first of all becoming more intelligent about producing, distributing and storing renewable energy (wind, water, solar, ...). Micro Grids might be an interesting approach to consider in this area, but this means that the IT infrastructure must be able to deal with lots small independent energy "providers" (maybe even down to the household level). There are ideas how to implement something like this, but nothing ready for prime time yet. Storing energy to deal with the peaks is another dimension of the problem that needs to be consider, but a combination of old and new (e.g. V2G - Vehicle to Grid) approaches might be suitable to provide some relief here.

Let's come back to the main topic: How to become more intelligent about consuming (less) energy (in the first place).

Three years ago I was driving in a cab from Zuerich Airport to a customer meeting. The cab was a Toyota Prius. It was my first time in a Prius. In general I work in a cab (email, phone, SMS, whatever, ...), but this time I was totally fascinated by a/the display in the middle of the dashboard. The display showed how the Prius was producing and consuming energy with its fuel-/electro- engines and -dynamos (in (soft-/near-) real-time). Brilliant!!! You get into a traffic jam and the natural play-/compete-with-your-car instinct kicks in and you try to move the car through the traffic jam, just by using the electro-engine (just by being gentle on the accelerator). And even without a traffic jam you are tempted to constantly compete with the car to make optimal usage of the available energy. The question is not anymore how fast you get from A to B. The question becomes "can I get from A to B using less than a gallon (less than 4 liters) of fuel". The display creates a totally new sense of awareness about what is going on and with that it starts to change behavior. The guys behind the Prius are geniuses. Adding the display makes the difference between a good and a great car, because with the display the Prius is not only a good car it is also changing societies, by changing awareness levels and behaviors.

What can we learn from this? Easy ... it is not good enough to optimize the way you consume energy, you also need to provide direct feedback to the consumer on how he/she is doing and must give the consumer tools/ways to influence the amount of energy that gets consumed. Basically you need to empower the consumer!!! You need to share the responsibility between those who produce the energy (to produce energy with the lowest environmental impact possible at the lowest possible cost) and those who consume the energy (to consume as less as possible).

The bad news is that in general right now households/consumers of energy (gas, oil, electricity, ...) are not aware of what, when, how (much) they consume. They get a bill (every month or every quarter) and have no insight into why they consumed this amount of energy and what to do/change to maybe reduce the energy consumption. The (immediate) feedback is missing. The display is missing.

But there is also good news. We can fix this. Originally Smart Meters concepts and technologies got introduced to allow the utility companies to read your meter without sending somebody to your house (a clear benefit for them; not so much for you :)). In the meantime smart meters have evolved. They can and will fix the "remote reading" problem, but they also allow you (the consumer) to get immediate feedback on your energy consumption.

But it might be a couple of years until smart meters get installed in (all of) the households (the only country in Europe, which is almost done with this is Italy). What do you do in the meantime? One option is to use a wireless energy monitor. The good news is these devices are available, do not cost a lot and are easy to install. The bad news is they are very limited with respect to their capabilities and connectivity.

What I am looking for is a smart meter or an energy monitor that is connected to my (W)LAN and is able to dump/collect the data to a hard-disk of my choice (laptop or special purpose appliance). I then want to be able to display the data in real-time on a display of my choice (TV, computer screen, mobile phone, ...).

To my knowledge such a device/appliance does not exist today.

Now things get even more tricky. How can I find out if my energy consumption is good or good enough (read near the optimum)? And how can I analyze/break down my energy consumption to identify potential culprits?

At the end we could upload the (location-aware) data to a data-warehouse and run analytics on it that would allow us to calculate the average per person per household in a certain area and provide feedback to the best/worst five energy consumers in the area. If you consume much more energy than you neighbors (per person) you might want to find out what the hell is going on (Google is working on something like this).

Bottom line: To change the behavior we need to visualize the problem (i.e. how much energy (electricity, gas, oil, ... you consume). It will take 5-10 years to bring smart meters to the majority of households in the developed world. In the meantime energy monitors can/should be used to give immediate feedback to you (the consumer), but currently these devices are very limited in terms of what they can monitor (most of them can only monitor electricity), capability (storing historic data) and connectivity (make the data available to a/the community for analysis).

Hhhhhhmmmmm ... any ideas??? Otherwise it seems I need to get my soldering gun out.

Reading books - Steve Jobs, Raising Boys and The Complete Robot

2009-06-18T10:50:00.004+01:00

A month ago I decided to use some of my time during the summer and work my way through the pile of books that I always wanted to read and never really got to. The first four weeks proofed to be interesting, very interesting.

I started with "ICon: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business". It is obviously a biography about Steve Jobs, but it is also a good book on the history of Apple, the Silicon Valley, Next, Disney and Pixar. It is an unauthorized biography and is (sometimes very) critical of Steve Jobs and how he got to where he is today.

"Raising boys" was the next one and is a must read for Mums and Dads. Some of the stuff is common sense, but some chapters give a good insight into what the hell is going on sometimes and why.

Currently I am reading "Isaac Asimov's - The Complete Robot" a collection of short stories about robots and how they will (potentially) become part of our society. One story talks about a boy who prefers his robot-dog over a real one. Just wondering how many children prefer their gameboy over a (real) dog. Good food for thought.

TEDx Dublin - Reviewing a very nice friday evening

2009-06-18T08:40:00.005+01:00

Last friday (means already almost a week ago) I had the chance to attend the first TEDx event in Dublin at the Science Gallery. To make a long story short ... it was a GREAT event. Great people, great presentations, great location. If you ever get the chance to attend a TEDx event or maybe even to attend a TED conference ... DO IT!!!

Just in case you have never heard about TED I suggest you check out the website. There are hundreds of thought-provoking videos and presentations available. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design. TED conferences are held every two years and provide a platform for Ideas Worth Spreading. And my god, some of these ideas are worth spreading indeed.

Here are a couple of presentations I found interesting ...

... and there are lots more.

Back to the event in Dublin ... we had about 200 people in the room (packed) and the event was very well organized and moderated by Aaron Quigley.

The presenters talked about ...

Blaise Aguera y Arcas - Photosynth and ways to construct 3D models from 2D pictures
Scott Rickard - Noise Separation and Sparsity (Using DUET to separate the sparsity)
Mark Billinghurst - How to make Augmented Reality (AR) more accessible for the masses

... and all of the presentations featured live demos of the research results (very impressive). There are good blog posts and pictures about the event available.

My personal favorite was Mark's presentation on AR. Can't wait for the Mac version of BuildAR to become available.

FUSEforge Lightsaber/Lightsabre - Research on Asynchronous Distributed OSGi (for Jedi's :))

2009-06-09T09:23:00.007+01:00

The Distributed OSGi spec (RFC 119) is coming along nicely, means now might be a good time to raise the head and start to think about what might come next. A couple of month ago David, Roman and myself got together and concluded to set up a research project on the alternatives available to potentially extend the Distributed OSGi spec with some asynchronous messaging concepts/capabilities.

The research is still ongoing, but the intermediate results (including a first demo!!!) are now available on FUSEforge (Project Lightsabre).

The demo will also be presented at OSGi DevCon Europe. Maybe (another) reason to attend. Enjoy and stay tuned.

Skills, Innovation and the future of Ireland - Bermuda Triangle or Trinity

2009-06-08T07:06:00.001+01:00

Ireland (like any other country in the world right now) needs to reinvent itself. The Celtic Tiger (1.0) is over. Question is: What's next? Do we want a Celtic Tiger 2.0? If so, how should it look like? And how do we make it happen?

Chris Horn has published a couple of interesting blog entries and articles on the topic.

For me the key is skills and innovation. Skill comes in two flavors: expertise and experience. The Celtic Tiger 1.0 was based on expertise. At the time Ireland was building a very well educated workforce (Trinity College, UCD, University of Limerick, ... ) and was also enjoying (or creating) other (monetary) benefits (like low corporate taxes, low wages, lots of EU aids, ...).

These times are clearly over and Ireland has to find a new (the next) niche to compete in the global economy. My hope and my belief is that Ireland can reinvent itself around a different set of skills, namely the experience the workforce has gained in the last 10 years. Right now is the (a good) time to reinvent Ireland as a place, where small startups can flourish and succeed: A European (Software) Business Incubator.

Lets make it happen.

Effective Android - Getting Started Guide for the Android Dev Phone 1

2009-05-28T18:29:00.005+01:00

This week I spend a day to get my new Android Phone up and running.

At the end I figured it might make sense to write up a cookbook on what to do when you finally get your hands on the box and unwrap your new toy. Here we go ...

The (ultimate :)) Android Getting Started Guide (for Mac Users :))

First things first: This guide assumes that you got yourself an Android Dev Phone 1. It will not work for the T-Mobile G1.

Obviously the first thing you want to do is to open the box, put the battery into the phone and charge it (for at least 3 hours). The phone comes with an US power-supply and an USB-cable, means in Europe you either need to have an adapter or you need to charge the phone with the USB-cable (I charged it with the cable).

The phone comes with the Android 1.0 firmware pre-installed, but the current version is 1.5 and is much better (yes, believe me - it is better). Therefore while charging the phone you might want to download a couple of files:

the Android SDK 1.5 - you need this for the tools
the Android 1.5 firmware (download ota-radio-2_22_19_26I.zip and signed-dream_devphone_userdebug-ota-148830.zip) - this is what you want to install on the phone (make sure to configure your browser (e.g. Safari) NOT to unzip the files after download - you need the zip files).

After the phone was charged I put my SIM-card into the phone and followed the instructions on the Start Here! Setup Guide that comes with the phone and went through the setup process. As part of this process you have to login to your Google Account (no comment :)). That also means that you need to have a GPRS connection and that means that your SIM card needs to have a data plan and that your APN must be configured to work with the phone (if this sounds like a little bit of a hassle - it is!!!).

After everything is up and running you might want to replace the very small 1GB microSD-Card with something bigger (you need to do this sooner or later anyway). I recommend at least an 8GB card. Just follow the instructions in the Setup Guide (and do not forget to unmount before you take the card out of the slot).

The next step is to install the SDK. Just unzip the file to a/the location of you choice (in my case /opt) and add the .../tools directory to your path (e.g. in the ~/.bashrc file).

Plug the phone into one of the USB-ports, start a shell and type ...

~\> adb devices
List of devices attached
HT93MLZ00125 device

... to verify that you can see the phone. You then need to follow the instructions from the HTC-website to upgrade the firmware to 1.5. A couple of observations ...

the firmware updater is always looking for a file called update.zip in the root of the SD-card, means while copying/pushing the file to the device you need to rename it to update.zip
to switch on logging you have to type ALT-l(og) not ALT-i (hard to read or I need new glasses :))
"5. Use the adb sync command to copy the contents of the radio image package to the update.zip archive on the device's SD card:$ adb push .zip /sdcard/update.zip" ... should probably read ... "5. Use the adb sync command to copy the contents of the recovery image package to the update.zip archive on the device's SD card:$ adb push .zip /sdcard/update.zip" (looks like an honest copy-and-paste bug :))

Afterwards you probably want to find a WLAN-Hotspot to speed up the rest of the configuration/setup process. But be aware ... my WLAN-Router was using channel 13 and initially the phone is configured to use only 11 channels, means my phone did not find my hotspot. To fix this you need to go to Settings > Wireless Controls > Wi-Fi Settings and press the Menu button, select Advance > Regulatory domain and tell the phone to use (all) 14 channels (took me *only* an hour to find this one :)).

The next step is to sync/upload you contacts to your Google Account and sync the contacts and the calendar. The sync is only working, if you have an iPod or an iPhone. Otherwise your best option is to upload your contacts.

Configuring the email client to work with your POP3 and/or IMAP mail accounts is straight forward.

Last but not least you want to install a couple more programs. Here is my hit-list ...

Twitteroid - a must have (obviously :))
Pixelpipe - very good (offline) (micro-) blogging client
Chess - the only game you need
GPS Status 2 - cool GUI
Hi AIM - one way to do IM
Skype (Beta) - was not able to make it work (yet)
NewsRob - RSS client to read your Goggle Reader Account
Par 3 Golf - ok, the "other" game you need
Glympse - to keep people in the loop on your whereabouts

To put some structure into the application space I created folders on my home screen and moved the apps into the appropriate folders (e.g Games, Tools, ...). BTW ... if you want to change the name of a folder you have to open it and put your finger on the title bar until the change-the-name dialog opens.

Finally you want to sync you iTunes Playlists and Podcasts with the phone. First you need to install software and then you need to mount the SD-card to the laptop. You can do this by pulling down the status/notification bar on the home screen and push the "USB connected" notification.

All of this took me (on and off) 8 hours. Next step is to set up a/the development environment. Sounds like another 8 hours of good fun lie ahead of me :).

Effective Andriod - a new category

2009-05-27T09:16:00.001+01:00

Last year I introduced categories like "Link of the Month" and "Effective Mac" to my bloging". Heads up ... there is a new category coming: Effective Android will talk about my adventures with my new Android phone.

Need a new phone - iPhone vs. Blackberry vs. Android

2009-05-18T16:16:00.002+01:00

Last year I went hill-walking with Andrew and Adrian in Kerry. By now everybody knows the story: I drowned my iPhone in Adrian's backpack. The backpack was 100% water-proof, means it did not let any water out and at the end of a 4 1/2 hour (irish) survival tour with heavy, "horizontal" rain the iPhone did not pass the "can-your-iPhone-also-work-under-water" test.

I decided to look at it as an opportunity. An opportunity to also "test" one of the last mobile devices I never had before: A Blackberry (Curve).

Unfortunately I have to admit it never really worked for me. The Blackberry is a good mobile email reader, but that's it. The iPhone is a mobile computing platform, that will also allow you to read your email, if you wish to do so. In the last 12 month I really missed my beloved iPhone :(.

Fortunately two weeks ago live-changing events opened up the opportunity for me to look at getting a new phone for myself. The first step was to look at my requirements:

Needs to be a mobile computing platform (not just a phone and an email reader).
Needs to allow me to write applications for it. If possible in JAVA. If possible using an OSGi container.
Needs to work in multiple countries (e.g. Germany, Ireland, Greece, ...) without killing me on the voice- and data-roaming charges. Means, if possible it should not be SIM-locked.
Needs to be affordable (both in terms of buying it and using it)

The list of options turned out to be kind of small. I first looked at the iPhone, but was not to happy with the plans and the prices that I can get for the iPhone (if you look for an iPhone without a SIM-lock it gets even worse). And the iPhone has no JVM (and will probably never have/get one).

I then looked at the Blackberry (Bold and Storm), but was not able to convince myself that these devices are the right platform for my software engineering ambitions in the next couple of weeks.

At the end I stumbled over an interesting alternative. The Android Platform! Exactly what I was looking for from a technical point of view (e.g. ability to run JAVA), but how about the rest of my requirements? It turns out that there is an Android Dev Phone that you can order (USD 399,- + VAT, one per developer), when you register yourself as an Android Developer (and the phone is SIM- and hardware-unlocked :)). Happy days!!!

My new toy will arrive in the next couple of days. Stay tuned. Will send out an update as soon as I am able to deploy the first bundles :).

Effective Mac - Make the Mac listen ...

2009-05-18T15:54:00.003+01:00

This morning I was using my new JawBone Bluetooth headset to make a Skype call. The quality was bad and therefore I decided to switch to my headset. The result was better, but still not what I was looking for. At the end I took the time to really understand, where the sound is coming from and to my big surprise I found out that the line-in jack is not working with normal headsets.

On the Mac you need a mic (or a headset) with "power" (e.g. a USB mic or a pre-amp mic).

Conclusion: I have stored away my headset and will use the built-in speaker/built-in mic to make calls. In case I need privacy I will just plug in my iPhone earbuds. That sounds like a/the winning configuration. But that also means that I do not have a solution for environments with a lot of background noise. Maybe I need to go back and need to find out why the quality with the JawBone was bad in the first place.

Orchestrating the orchestration - EIP vs. BPEL vs. BPML

2009-01-23T12:46:00.003Z

Occasionally (and in any case not often enough) I am having diner or lunch (or any another excuse) to meet my dear friend Klaus Grieger. He is a Principal Architect with CIMT AG. Klaus is what I would call a "deep thinker". Discussions with him are in between interesting, challenging, invigorating and exhausting :).

The topic of the Christmas Lunch (we had the choice between "The best Worscht in Town" (Worscht is Hessian Slang for sausage) and "Positive Eating" and we did the right thing) was his observation that there is good news and bad news when it comes to the topic of (services) orchestration: the (from my point of view) good news is that more and more companies start to use orchestration concepts to introduce a cleaner separation of concern to their (service-oriented) architectures. The bad news is that a lot of customers seem to be confused what orchestration is (e.g. "orchestration is BEPL") and how to use/implement it.

Before we start we should probably introduce a couple of standards, abbreviations and concepts:

*EIP - Enterprise Integration Patterns - A set of design patterns to design, build and deploy messaging solutions for distributed systems. Based on the book by Gregor Hophe and Bobby Woolf.

*DSL - Domain Specific Language - A DSL is a programming language dedicated to a specific problem domain. There are solutions available to describe EIPs with DSLs.

*(WS-)BPEL - Business Process Execution Language - A language to describe the orchestration of (web-)services.

*BPML - Business Process Modeling Language - A superset of BPEL. More suitable to describe workflows.

*BPMN - Business Process Management Notation - BPEL does not define a/the way to describe the business processes in a graphical way. This is addressed by BPMN. You can generate BPEL from BPMN.

There are also a couple of good discussions available on orchestration vs. cheography.

My suggestion is to structure the discussion by introducing different levels of orchestration:

*Component-Level/Microflow Orchestration - within a service

*Services-Level/Business-Process Orchestration - between services, but no interactions with humans and no long-running processes/transactions

*Workflows - between services, including interactions with humans (e.g. approvals, etc.)

The big question is, if BPEL is the silver bullet for all of these and the answer for me is clearly no. Using BPEL to do component-level orchestration is clearly overkill. EIPs (using a java-based DSL) are much better suited to get this job done. BPEL has also its limitations when it comes to the description of workflows. Using BPML to implement/describe your workflows might be a better choice.

But BPEL is clearly the language of choice when it comes to the orchestration of services in a SOA. At the same time, even this decision should not be taken lightly. One of the cited main advantages of using BPEL (and the tools that need to come with it) is the ability to design, change and maintain business processes in a graphical way (including the claim that this can be done by your business domain experts). My question is: do you really need this? How often do your business processes or more specifically the orchestration of the processes change? Once a week? Once a month? Once a year? If it is the later, you might want to reconsider the decision to introduce BPEL (and all of the overhead that comes with it) to your project/company, since it might be easier to just write two pages of JAVA code and you are done.

Executive Summary: I can recommend to have lunch in the Cha Cha. Good fresh food. Not to heavy. On the topic of orchestration I recommend a practical approach: start buttom up. Use DSL-based EIP as much as possible, before you use BEPL-based services-orchestration and/or BPML-based workflows.

Commercial Open Source for Apache Projects - Survival of the fittest

2009-01-22T18:28:00.005Z

Just found another company offering commercial support for Apache ServiceMix and Apache ActiveMQ (like we do :)). For me this is good news. It shows that more and more people use Apache integration projects in mission-critical deployment scenarios. And that these deployments generate enough value for customers to warrant an "insurance" against worst-case scenarios.

For me it was never the goal to be the only company to offer consulting, training and support for Apache integration projects. My goal was (and will always be) to provide the "best" (read most valuable) consulting, training and support offerings you can get for these projects.

Luckily Progress shares this ambition. This year we will increase the revenue we generate with FUSE (and the budget that comes with it) by roughly 200%.

Statements like this ...

"With the recent announcement of Progress Software acquiring Iona Technologies, Freedom OSS believes that professional support for Servicemix ESB and Active MQ will be dropped from IONA/Fuse."

... can safely be considered FUD.

Effective Mac - Sleeping on the plane

2009-01-10T08:38:00.002Z

About a year ago, I "borrowed" the battery from Christina's MacBook to extend my "life", while I am on the plane. The Mac (being the Mac) has a nice feature, which will hibernate the machine when the battery gets low. This allows you to change the battery without rebooting.

I was looking for a way to hibernate the machine on demand. This is also useful if you want to conserve battery power (e.g. while one a plane). The sleep mode is a drain on the battery, because the RAM needs to be kept alive/refreshed. This is especially a problem, if you have a lot of RAM.

Found the following applescript. Seems useful.

Effective Mac - Using OpenOffice, NeoOffice and/or iWorks08

2009-01-04T12:19:00.002Z

Finally! OpenOffice is now available for the Mac. In the last two month I used OpenOffice 3.0, NeoOffice 2.2.5 and iWorks08 in parallel (with a special focus on the presentation functionality).

The result is surprising (and maybe not :)). If you use the "native" formats (e.g. ODF, .key/.page) everything works fine. Obviously things get more interesting, if you want to use these tools to read and write MS-Office files (.ppt/.doc/.xls) or even MS-Office 2007 files (.pptx, etc.).

In this case it is my experience that you (still) have to limit yourself to a (non-obvious) subset of the functionality to make sure you can import/export your files to/from MS-Office. Especially for Powerpoint 2007 files I currently have to use all three tools and see, which tool will give me the best result, when I import .pptx files. In some cases entire slides show up blank. In other cases they are "reformated" in a way that makes them unreadable.

Buttom line: It seems that for the time being, neither OpenOffice nor NeoOffice is a solution on its own, when it comes to importing/exporting to/from MS-Office. But that may change in the future.

Conference Update - Apache Con, Java Days and ACCU

2009-01-04T11:53:00.002Z

It seems over Christmas a lot of people did what I did: Clean up the Todos, catch up on EMail and get ready for 2009. As a side effect my colleagues and I (the Open Source Center of Competence in Progress) got notifications from various conference committees that our speaking proposals got accepted.

* Andreas and Adrian will talk/present at ApacheCon 2009 in Amsterdam (NL)

* David will talk/present at the Italian JavaDays 2009 in Rome (IT)

* And myself will talk/present at ACCU 2009 in Oxford (UK)

Don't miss the chance to drop us a line or just corner us to catch up on the state of affairs with respect to Open Source, Integration, Mobile Computing, Live, Universe and everything else.

Link of the Month - TwitterFeed

2008-12-28T14:48:00.004Z

In the last two month I have put some work into my online presence (website, blog, twitter, linked-in, ...). Obviously I try to minimize the maintenance effort for me, but maximize the user experience for the "customers" of my online presence (I am talking about you, dear reader :)).

One great tool in this regard is TwitterFeed. It allows you to create "feeds", which will "listen" on RSS feeds and will then turn them into tweets. An obvious use case is to create a "listener" on your own block and make sure your followers learn when you publish a new blog entry.

A more sophisticated, integrated (and wwwwaaaayyyyy cooler) use case is to use NetNewsWire to read your RSS feeds/news/articles and use the integration with del.ico.us to bookmark what you read. You then go to TwitterFeed and create a listener on the RSS feed on your del.ico.us account and voila: everytime you are reading something and bookmark it with del.ico.us a tweet gets generated. Very elegant. I like it.

I also added a "My Del.ico.us" widget to my blog (on the right hand side), which means that my reading list will also get updated automatically.

Check it out. Let me know, if there are more better ways to integrate your online presence.

Apache CXF vs. Axis 2 - The current state of affairs or The missing book

2008-12-07T13:16:00.001Z

(Blogging from the plane again. This time on my way to the Progress
Sales Kickoff in Miami.)

The other day I stumbled over a good presentation
from Falko Riemenschneider. The high-level summary is ...

* Axis 2 is not as easy to use as CXF, but is more ubiquitous in the
marketplace (and got better documentation, including a book in german)
* CXF is a very well developed piece of software, but needs more
people using it (and needs more/better documentation, including a book
in any language, but preferably in english)

I need to think about this book thing. Anybody interested to write a
book about CXF in English?

<Couldn't keep my mouth shut>
I am volunteering myself to translate it into German.
</Couldn't keep my mouth shut>

FUSE on the german autobahn - listing to a CAOS podcast

2008-11-25T09:14:00.005Z

For private reasons I had/have to spend some time in Germany these days. The house of my parents is about 45 mins away from the office, means I get to listen to some podcasts while I am doing 160 miles/hour on the german autobahn. One of my favorite podcasts is the CAOS Theory podcast from the 451 Group.

Yesterday I was listening to one that discussed the current state of affairs with respect to the Open Source Middleware space. One of the conclusions was that FUSE will probably benefit from the Progress acquisition, because Progress made a clear commitment to Open Source and will increase the investment in FUSE.

Just for the record: These conclusions are correct.

FUSE Quickstart - a sneak preview

2008-11-14T07:48:00.004Z

Yes, we are busy to add new content to FUSEsource :). First we published a/the first set of FUSE TV videos and next we are going to publish a set of "FUSE Quickstart" screen casts. Take a look at the sneak preview and/or wait for the high-res versions to become available on FUSEsource later on this month.

Tip/Hint: The best way to get the sneak preview is to subscribe to the podcast and download all videos into iTunes :).