The Porter Method

OK, so less than 30 minutes into the morning of JavaOne and I am sorely not impressed with the organizational planning. Keynote begins at 8:30am, around 5,000 people will be attending, there is a drizzling rain outside, so what did the planners decide….have everyone line up outside until they open the doors at 8:30. Bad idea.

Breakfast is served inside the exhibitor pavilion, but there is also a line for 5,000 people waiting, and they ran out of pastries and bagels. So if I were ready to wait till 9:00am I would get some coffee, but I’ve got to go stand in the rain so I don’t miss the keynote.

So far Sybase’s TechWave 2004 is beating the pants off of JavaOne 2005 in terms of organization and good planning. Hopefully the content will make up for these little annoyances.

Spent my first full day in San Francisco and boy are my legs tired. Quite a bit more geography here than where I’m from (plus you can’t really walk to get anywhere in Mobile, AL. Cars are definitely required). Went by the convention center and got registered, so now I definitely have a spot at the conference. We skipped the NetBeans Day Session (since we are die hard Eclipse faithful), but Tim Bray blogged about it.

One thing that struck from a social networking point of view is the conference badge. It consists of a neck strap attached to a plastic sleeve that holds a paper printout of what level of access you have to the conference. It also holds a plastic smart card with you name and company listed on it and an embedded chip. The chip is used for keeping track of attendance to sessions and also to use the internet terminals at the conference.

Now the social networking part, the name and company listed on the smart card are in quite tiny print. You wear this around your neck during the conference, so anyone talking around you should be able to see you name on the badge (in case they have forgotten or just to strike up a conversation with you by name). But from the font size of this thing, I don’t think anyone without perfect vision is going to be able to read this thing from more than a few feet away. Also missing from the conference badge is where you are from. This is another way for people to strike up conversations if they see a location that is familiar to them or interesting, but alas, it is not listed on the badge. Kathy Sierra would probably agree with me on this point (and by the way she will be signing books along with Bert Bates tomorrow at 3:00pm, hopefully I can say hi). Am I the only one that has this idea about the use of the badge for social networking??? I think not.

Sybase got it exactly right last year at TechWave 2004 in Orlando, FL, where a coworker and I presented a great session if I do say so myself. 🙂 The TechWave conference badges very, very prominently (and in large font) displayed your name, company, and where you were from. This made it very easy to strike up conversations with people on a variety of things. We’ll see how they do for TechWave 2005

Case in point, one person I made the acquaintance of at the conference had the name Don Clayton. Now having worked in high school at a Putt-Putt Golf and Games, I knew that Don S. Clayton created Putt-Putt in 1954 (actually met him in 1994), so I walked up to this individual and asked if he knew who the other famous Don Clayton was…interesting conversation ensued. So Strke One against Sun. Computer people as a general rule need as much help as possible socializing, so please give them every nudge and edge you can.

Well tomorrow my official coverage begins. We start at 8:30am with a keynote from Jonathan Schwartz (who is a prolific blogger). Can’t wait to get started.

If you are out here at the conference and want to get together, give me a ring on my cell or send an e-mail. It is listed in the top right corner.

As I mentioned previously, I have been looking for an open source BizTalk like product and one of the solutions I wanted to evaluate was the Business Integration Engine from the Brunswick Corporation.

I finally got around to downloading and installing BIE and wanted to write about the experience so far. The main function I would like this product to provide for us is for it to manage the receipt and exchange of files from our trading partners. The promise of tools like this is for the tool to present a documented view of the file exchanges and file formats being used and prevent one from having to write a new parser each time a new trading partner comes on board with their own custom file format (or changes their format).

So far after a little bit of tinkering, I’m pretty impressed. The product is built on top of JBoss and the installation is very straightforward. Download the latest install from the SourceForge project page, extract and install.

After installation you may start the BIE service via the start menu menu item. You can then browse to the product dashboard on localhost:5803

From here one of the shortcoming shows up. The product does not come with any documentation. The company that originally wrote BIE offers documentation for a small fee (couple hundred bucks), but it would be nice to have a little bit more information to get a feel for the product (that’s where I come in I suppose).

BIE breaks processes into WorkFlows. A WorkFlow is a set of actions that can be triggered, such as parsing a file into XML, mapping that XML into a different format, and then updating a database with the resulting data.

When parsing a file into XML it does this via a MessageFormat. You can define various message formats for your files. They come in different flavors such as (MS Excel, Comma Delimited, Fixed Width, XML, etc). You enter the criteria for your file and save it with an identifiable name. For example, with a fixed width file, you enter what row the data starts on (in case there are header rows), enter a comma delimited list of the field names, and then a comma delimited list of the length of each field and save it. That is all that is required to teach it how to parse a new fixed width file. Pretty spiffy, no code required.

WorkFlows can be triggered by a variety of listeners. The built in set of listeners includes a JMS listener, a directory watcher, an FTP directory watcher, a mailbox watcher, and a scheduled listener that can execute workflows on a periodic basis.

The listener that interests me the most is the directory watcher. When receiving a file from a trading partner, they push the file to us. The directory watcher scans a directory and takes action when a file appears.

When a file is found, BIE looks at the filename and reads everything in the filename up to a period (.) or underscore (_) character. Then it takes that text and looks for a WorkFlow by the same name.

You construct WorkFlows using a graphical editor that allows one to drag and drop and connect various actions together to perform your process. These can consist of logging operations, database operations, XML translations, XSLT transformations, sending Email, File operations, etc, etc, etc.

Enough for now, next time I’ll post some screen shots and go into more nuts a bolts of stringing a WorkFlow together.

Here are some links that were extremely useful (once I found them all that is):

BIE SourceForge Project Page
Brunswick WDI BIE Page
BIE SourceForge Mailing List Page
BIE FAQ through Adaptive Dynamics
Brunswick WDI BIE Discussion Forum

I had the opportunity last night to be a tester for my friend Julie’s CIS Master’s degree thesis project at the University of South Alabama. It is a voice driven IDE based on Eclipse and using IBM’s Via Voice software.

Now of course whenever anyone gives me a headset with a microphone attached to it to put on a couple of things happen. First I have flashbacks of my days doing tech support which causes me to break into a cold sweat. Then I become the control tower scene in the movie Airplane – Roger, Roger, what’s our vector, Victor… etc. But after that I finally got focused and began to test the app.

Let me just say that the application is a very nice piece of work. I have encouraged her to get a project page up on the web so I can link to it, and also for her to hopefully release the source code under an open source license if the University will allow it.

The project deals with allowing the creation and manipulation of an SWT GUI using only voice commands. It does not deal with populating the code in the events on the visual objects just creating the GUI, its layout, and the properties of the visual objects.

A couple of things that stood out to me. The voice recognition stuff was very nice but still has a long way to go. Unfortunate, but that is just the fact of the times we are in right now.

Also I must have either a speech impediment or a crazy accent, because the Via Voice software really couldn’t understand when I said the words “clear”, “back”, and “two”. Of course I only trained it using a 5 minute passage from Treasure Island, but still it has me paranoid now that maybe I don’t know how to speak the Queen’s English.

As for the outcome of the road trip last weekend, all was as it should be. Def Leppard, contrary to my expectations, really put on an awesome show. I couldn’t have asked for more (well except for my friends picking a better spot to stand than right behind a big tree). From my vantage point, I can tell you that the guitar players on either end of the stage were great. Not sure about the guys in the middle of the stage since the tree was right there 🙂

It was truly a great send off to Rob. We will wish him well in his new position on the West Coast. Of course I’ll see him there in a week since I’ll be out in San Francisco for JavaOne. Not enough time left to get everything done before I leave this weekend, but I will manage somehow.

Today I’m heading up to Birmingham, AL to hang out with my friend Rob in his last weekend as a resident of the great state of Alabama. He has accepted a job with Intel and will be trekking out to Sacramento, CA. That will actually work out well for me, since I’ll be out in San Francisco, CA (a bit south and west on the picture) for 2 weeks starting a week from this Saturday. So I’ll get to check out his new stomping grounds.

Saturday some friends from here in Mobile will be driving up to Birmingham so we can all attend City Stages and rock out to the one and only Def Leppard. We saw them a year or two ago when they came to Pensacola, FL. Awful show. It was like they really didn’t want to be there but had to pay the bills. Probably be more of the same Saturday (since they have gone from playing civic centers to outdoor festivals), but in their day they made some great 80’s rock so I can hope they put on a decent show (do it for all the hair bands that have come before you)

Some links for today:

Going to JavaOne? Like free T-Shirts? The Eclipse group will be giving out free t-shirts at JavaOne if you visit 6 of the Eclipse project’s supporting companies’ booths (of course Sybase is now a contributing partner).

Release 1.1 for jTDS is out. Very nice opensource JDBC driver for SQL Server and Sybase databases.

Awesome DHTML/JavaScript calendar definitely need to get this incorporated into our work websites. Found from a link in a post on Brian Bailey’s Leave it Behind blog