The Porter Method

Well a site has finally been put up for the Lower Alabama Dot Net Users Group. Please go to this site and register if you would like to be included on mailings regarding this user group’s events.

The site is being run on DotNetNuke and the webspace has been graciously provided by ACO Employment Services. They also have an Information Services group that creates a securities tracking piece of software called STAR.

Hopefully we’ll see a high level of interest for the user group in the community.

On another note, I have set up a Wiki for BIE (Business Integration Engine). The wiki is located at: http://biewiki.schtuff.com. This will give the user community a place to park resources for BIE. Schtuff.com is a great site that provides free Wiki’s with up to 200 MB of space.

Well Friday was supposed to be my day to go take the Sun Certified Java Associate Beta Exam. I was looking forward to checking it out and also being able to provide constructive feedback to the test designers. Unfortunately Hurricane Dennis had other plans for my testing experience.

I received a phone call today from the Triangle of Technology Prometric Testing Center in Pensacola, FL (closest place to Mobile, AL that offers the Sun tests) saying their power was still not restored (and might be back by Tuesday) so I would have to reschedule. Only one problem with rescheduling….the beta exam period ends tomorrow.

Oh well, hopefully the test designers can get by without my input.

So to cheer myself up I went ahead and signed up for the Sun Certified Java Developer exam (been meaning to but was waiting on the Associate exam to pass first) using my handy dandy discount voucher I received for participating in the Certified Programmer beta exam.

Sun very quickly processed my submission and sent me the link for the application. So I have downloaded it and hopefully will get started this weekend. For those that are interested I received the B&S application.

I promise I’m still going to write up more about JavaOne 2005. Hopefully this weekend.

Also something I just saw. The SD West 2006 Call for Papers is up. I’ll have to put together a submission for this one and see if I can get accepted.

Tomorrow (Friday July 8, 2005) I’m heading back to Mobile. Been out here in San Francisco for almost 2 weeks (JavaOne 2005 and then a week of vacation with the GF). And it looks like I’ll have a warm welcome when I get back from Hurricane Dennis.

Funny thing about the big city, as Casey and I were printing out our boarding passes in the 1st floor internet area of the Commodore Hotel, we ran into a couple from Pensacola, FL that were looking at the hurricane’s projected path. Hopefully it will work out well for both of us. We were both hoping it would sweep East and hit Tallahassee, FL instead of Pensacola or Mobile. We’ll see how it goes.

I promise I have a ton to write about JavaOne. I filled up a legal pad and had to start writing on the backs of the pages, so once I get home I’ll break it down by the day. Sorry for the delay, but it has just been too busy a 2 weeks. The short version is ….. Spring, Hibernate, Groovy, ActiveMQ, JBI, ServiceMix, Sybase… will expand later.

Java Business Integration – A Foundation for SOA
Ron Ten-Hove and Peter Walker, Senior Staff Engineers with Sun Microsystems

This session (which I found out this morning was the most attended session from yesterday) went into the SOA concept and where the new Java Business Integration (JBI) standard fits into it. It ended up being more of an SOA description than really getting into the details of JBI. It was a very buzz-word centric talk. It basically ended up rehashing what was mentioned in the keynote regarding this technology.

Some links regarding it:
http://java.sun.com/integration
http://java.sun.com/developer/earlyaccess/jbi

Groovy = Java Technology + Ruby + Python for the JVM
Rod Cope, CTO and Founder of OpenLogic
Groovy Project Page

This session was definitely the best one I saw from the day. Rod Cope was an exceptional presenter of material and very funny to boot. I would highly recommend checking him out if you get a chance.

Groovy is yet another scripting language. The beauty of this one is that it is fully available inside Java and actually Java code is Groovy code…

The scripting language provides a concise powerful scripting language that gets compiled down to good old Java classes. It was begun in August 2003 and has a thriving community built around it.

Some of its features are:
Dynamic and Static (Optional) typing
Native Syntax for Lists, Maps, Arrays, and Beans
Autoboxing
Closures (which are nice little methods defined on the fly)
Built-in RegEx support
Operator Overloading

The technology fully integrates with Ant, and can actually be used to replace much of what Ant does. It can also be used inside Ant scripts to give a bit more programmatic control (such as If statements and loops, etc).

Groovy provides very, very simple methods to read and write XML, HTML, and interact using SQL. There is a wrapper that allows Groovy to use COM automation to automate things like Word, Excel (and it is super easy too). It also has a scripting shell that can be used interactively (for those of you that love a good shell).

All in all, great little quick and dirty scripting language. Low barrier to entry for Java programmers. Really can provide great utility in writing test cases in your unit tests. Not yet ready for mission critical apps, but version 1.0 should be out by September and Rod apparently has a book in the works on Groovy so I will be looking forward to that.

A Hitchhiker’s Guide to SOA – Orchestrating Loosely Coupled J2EE Services with BPEL and BPMN
Charles Beckham, Todd Fast, Mike Frisino, Sun Microsystems

This session was a quite entertaining overview of the ideas and concepts involved with SOA, including descriptions of BPEL, ACDC worker services and BPMN. It of course followed the layout of the Hitchhiker’s guide from starting with the phrase Don’t Panic to including witty definitions from The Guide for each of the topics.

Basically the jist of what we are shooting forward is a collection of loosely coupled services. The problem is how to describe the services in ways that the business analysts can understand and how to make all of this fancy new fangled XML easy to work with.

BPEL – Business Process Execution Language – XML based language that specifies processes. It describes long running stateful transactional conversations between two or more partner services

Now BPEL itself doesn’t really do any work, he is more of the coordinator of things and controls the exchange of messages back and forth amongst the various partners. BPEL relies on ACDC (no, not the band, though they are quite good) Worker Services to do the actual work. ACDC stands for Async, Conversational, Document Centric services. These perform the actual actions that our traffic cop (so to speak) BPEL does.

BPMN – Business Process Modeling Notation – BPEL unfortunately is difficult to write (being XML and all), and even more difficult to visualize (being XML and all). BPMN is a standard notation format (developed by BPMI) that is a kind of flowcharting language with special considerations for BPEL. BPMN can be mapped to BPMN (and vice versa)

Of course here is then where everything drifted off into the marketing world. As luck would have it, Sun’s Java Studio Enterprise has a set of tools to handle all of the creation of BPMN, BPEL, mapping between formats, managing the partners of various services, etc, etc. So off we went into Marketing-land to view what Java Studio Enterprise can do to handle all of this fancy stuff 🙂

But overall quite informative even though they diverged a bit at the end. Plus the Charlse, Todd, and Mike show was very humorous.

Visualizing Gizmos, Gadgets, Whatchamacalits
Mike Brown, Boeing Corp

This session talked about using Java3D to do some very interesting real time modeling and physics type modeling. A bit over my head since I’m not really a graphics guy, but it was entertaining to watch Mike’s virtual shirt thrower he built go to town on his computer based on the physics rules he defined.

And thus ended the sessions for day 1. We spent some time chatting at the Sybase booth (since we are big Sybase fans) checking out their new product Workspace (based on Eclipse, very cool. Check it out

The Keynote went quite well this morning. They had a pretty interesting band called Magnetic Poetry playing prior to the event. John Gage of Sun was the MC for the session. Jonathan Schwartz spoke and thanked the community for a great 10 years. His focus was on openness and community as the real driver of technology and adoption. He also spoke about the concept of technology as a social utility which was a very interesting idea. He mentioned Brazil’s health system as a great example (said it put our CDC to shame).

There was a presentation by Yasushi Nishimura, Director of Panasonic R&D about the new BlueRay DVD technology. One cool thing they mentioned was that the BlueRay standard had chosen to use Java for the menu system and API on the disc. So every BlueRay DVD player will include a JVM and also…drum roll please….a network port. Let the hackers get ready for what they can come up with with those tools available.

Sun has made nice with IBM and they renewed their partnership for 11 more years (10% better than the previous 10 year agreement so they said). Also IBM will be providing support across their entire software suite for Solaris 10 (which is open source now).

Java = Participation and FOSS. Schwartz made a nice compelling case for the free open source software movement. Free is the perfect price, there is no downside from FOSS, community is where it is at, etc, etc.

They announced Java Business Integration (JBI) as defined in JSR-208. Looks like everyone is doing SOA these days…and this also moves into my Business Integration Engine type system. So I’m very interested in checking this out.

Open Sourcing of Sun’s Application Server (Project Glassfish) with a CDDL license.

Whole set of new features for the Java Studio Creator product line, including integration with their application server and the JBI spec, BPEL, BPMN, Mapping, Routes, etc, etc….

The T-shirt hurler of the day was based on an Angle Grinder, but really didn’t do much flinging. The shirts just sort of fell out of the launcher.

Graham Hamilton announced that they are finally dropping the stupid 2 from the product names J2SE, J2EE, J2ME goes to JSE, JEE, JME. About time. Also they will go to whole numbers with no decimals. So after JSE 5.0 it will move to JSE 6, JSE 7, and so on.

Java development themes for the future – Become more open. Weekly snapshots available of the Java 6 development. Contributions can even be made to the code line from the community. Couple of new licenses to facilitate this access – Java Distribution License (JDL), Java Research License (JRL), Java Internal Use License (JIUL)

Bill Shannon announced details of the Java EE Roadmap for the future. Simplification is the main thing for Java EE going forward. A shift to allow POJO development with Java EE, extensive used of annotations to reduce the need for deployment descriptors.

The release schedule is Java EE 5 final draft spec Q3 2005, SDK Beta Release Q4 2005 and Final Release Q1 2006.

Will post about the sessions from day 1 a bit later. Currently I’m in the keynote listening to how Mobile is going to conquer the world 🙂