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open source

Application Integration based on Open Source (FUSE)

Last week i attended a seminar on “Application Integration based on Open Source (FUSE) ” organized by Progress Software and Flusso.

The FUSE brand is based on a set of leading projects from the Apache Software Foundation.
They include products like FUSE ESB (based on Apache ServiceMix),
FUSE Message Broker (based on Apache ActiveMQ),
FUSE Services Framework (based on Apache CXF)
and FUSE Mediation Router (based on Apache Camel).

Besides these products they deliver a plugin for Eclipse for implementing patterns (FUSE Integration Designer).
For managing and monitoring the FUSE based infrastructures you can make use of the FUSE HQ, which is part of the support subscription.

On the blog of one of the FUSE employees i just read they also provide online free virtual trainingen for Apache ServiceMix and Camel.

The agenda for the day

  • Enterprise Messaging with ActiveMQ by Rob Davies
  • OpenWire, Stomp or AMQP by Frank Staijen
  • Introduction to OSGi by Marcel Offermans
  • ServiceMix 4: Integrating OSGi and JBI by Gert Vanthienen
  • Apache Foundation history by Dirk-Willem van Gulik
  • Enterprise Integration Patterns with Apache Camel by James Strachan

Some keywords for me to look at :

  • OpenWire
  • Stomp
  • Camel Rest
  • RESTMQ
  • cachedb
  • osgi/apache felix
  • apache ace
  • apache service mix/apache felix karaf/service mix nmr/service mix jbi
  • apache camel/bam support/camel mock

It was a nice day with some good introductions on the different products. FUSE delivers a nice stack of products for supporting integration solutions. Besides the stacks like Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle/SUN Open ESB/Glassfish ESB, FUSE got good potentional to deliver strenghts on integrations projects. Besides widely used open source software, support from a big community they will give their own support to the customer.

And a nice quote by one of the speakers
The latest is the greatest, as long as i don’t need to demo it!

*update
download the presentation over here.

Original blog

bea, esb

BEA WorkSpace Studio, import sbconfig.jar

For alsb development we both use the console and the workspace studio of bea.
So once in a while i need to do some changes in the console and import the sbconfig.jar back into the ide.
In the current workspace i delete all projects and ‘try’ to import the sbconfig.jar.

The next error pops up :
[sourcecode language=’xml’]
Import failed: Validation failed with diagnostic messages. Diagnostics for WSDL /WSDLs/
ERROR: <0> Validation of WSDL /WSDLs/ failed:
[/sourcecode]

The simple fix.
Drop the workspace, create a new one and import the jar the in clean workspace. Guess it leaves some artifacts in the workspace which abort the import process.

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soa

The Open Group has released their SOA Source Book

The Open Group has released their SOA Source Book.

The introduction tells us “The Open Group’s SOA Source Book is a collection of source material for use by enterprise architects working with Service-Oriented Architecture. The material reflects input from a large number of people from a wide range of Open Group member companies, including product vendors, consultancies, and users of SOA. In some cases, these people have brought concepts developed, not just by themselves, but by groups of people within their organizations. The input has been refined and further developed through discussion within the Working Group. The value in the result is due to the ideas and efforts of the Working Group members.”

The book is free for online reading, go get it!

Original blog

esb

Oracle Service Bus, use of shared resources

At the moment i’m busy with a migration of an alsb 2.6 enviroment to an alsb 3.0 enviroment.
In the alsb processes extra functionality is invoked by making use of the java call outs.
Nothing wrong with this if you ask me, the only thing which i’m wondering is, wont these java call outs mess up the transactional context of alsb processes itself.

At the moment the libraries which are being used are deployed with every servicebus process itself.
So we have/had some sort of default structure like

  • business services
  • proxy services
  • lib
  • wsdl

Works fine, but not really the ideal situation if you have reusable resources over servicebus projects.
You’re able to reuse the components from other projects and link to them by using relative links (for example when you want to reuse xsd’s from other projects) or link to the library of an other servicebus project.

These situations force you to create dependencies between the projects, something we don’t want either.

Solutions

First solution

The solution we implement at the moment to keep everying on-going is the next.
We created a ‘Shared Resources’ servicebus project with folders for libraries/wsdl/xsd/business services/etc. Every resource which will be reused by other projects will be created in here. Every servicebus project itself which is going to use a resource will link to this project and the resource it needs.

This works great if you’re working with components which exists only in the servicebus itself.
When integration is happening and for example applications from vendors are integrating with our servicebus projects they could use certain resources from the ‘shared resources’ project. But in this case my servicebus project will be some sort of repository of resources available for not only the servicebus projects. So i’m creating an extra dependency between the servicebus and the other applications.

Better solution (imho)

Remove all the re-usable resource from the servicebus itself. We need to bring those to some higher level of sharing of which both the servicebus and the other applications will make use. In this case a product like ‘Oracle Enterprise Repository’ could be used.
In this repository we can store all the resources and artifacts which will be used enterprise wide.

To make use of a java call out, we need to create the resource in the servicebus project itself. So we can’t store these libraries on the repository.
Maybe a short coming which is ok for this situation.

If we want to store these java libraries on a repository we have the intention to share these enterprise wide. But in these situations we must investigate if a plain java class is the best way to make the functionality available or should we ‘service enable’ the java classes so they can be used more easily for integration in other projects.
The userguide / Usage Guidelines gives as a few situations/best practices when to use ejb functionality instead of plain pojos.

Do we have functionality delivered by the java classes which is only used in the servicebus projects to support the servicebus process itself then we could just registrate the libraries in the shared resources servicebus project (jar resource) and reuse it from here.

Conclusion

For reuse of resources and artifacts in servicebus projects we could use the next setup.

Shared Resources servicebus project for storing the business services/proxy services/servicebus-only used java libraries/etc.
Enterprise Repository for storing resources like xsd/wsdl/etc
Service enable java classes which are used enterprise wide,so we don’t need to store functionality on several places

Any of you doing osb/alsb projects and have a better ‘solution’ for these situations ?

Original blog

oracle

Oracle buys Sun, another one for the collection

Oracle buys Sun, and another one for the collection

The blogreaders keep popping up with the blogs about the new acquisition of Oracle.
Lately Oracle already bought BEA, and from this acquisition the new stack isn’t even ready yet.
A lot of new products, overlapping eachother so Oracle will need to decide what products will go on on development, and what will parts will flow away.

IDE

  • Oracle Jdeveloper
  • Eclipse
  • Netbeans

JVM

  • Sun JDK
  • JRocket

Application Server

  • Oracle AS/OC4J (already replaced)
  • BEA Weblogic
  • Sun Glassfish

SOA Integration

  • Oracle SOA Suite
  • Open ESB

Database

  • Oracle DB
  • MySQL

SSO

  • Oracle SSO
  • OpenSSO

Portal

  • Sun Portal Server
  • Oracle Portal
  • BEa Portal Server

DS

  • Oracle Internet Directory
  • OpenDS

The list isn’t completed but it will just give a short overview, i will add more compairs later.

I think in most situations Oracle will keep supporting the several versions of the products in the stacks.
After the BEA acquisition we already had a few products in the stack with overlap, but if we compair BEA and Oracle they both had a set of ‘closed/propriatery’ products/functionality.
The portfolio of Sun is mostly based (for as far i know) on open source products with a really big community behind it. I don’t think Oracle would spoil this big part of the market and on they other site would replace every ‘closed product’ with a open source variant of the Sun stack.
So i think it will be on the one site a mix of Oracle/BEA products and on the other site the portfolio for the Sun portfolio (open source).

Besides just filling in a new portfolio (again) of the overall stack of Oracle, i think they will even more invest and support the open source community.

Good to see some can still enjoy a bit of humor!

Original blog

osb

Oracle Service Bus (OSB) workshop, WAAI project

This week i gave a workshop about the new Oracle Service Bus together with Ronald van Luttikhuizen.
The workshop is part of the WAAI project.

The WAAI project is a joint initiative between IT-eye, AMIS, Approach Alliance and Whitehorses.
Colleagues of the different companies working together to get knowledge about the new Fusion Middleware 11g stack and share this knowledge which each other.

The workshop was hosted at AMIS, thanks for help!
The attenders of the workshop had the ability to get used to the OSB. We defined 3 cases which made use of the different components of the service bus.

Since most of the attenders also had experience with the ‘old’ Oracle ESB, we had some time left to get some discussion on both of the service buses.
A short list of their experiences.

pro

  • lots of functionality
  • console for editting and better support for logging/monitoring
  • xquery
  • adapters/transport (ejb,mail)
  • more validation

cons

  • lots of functionality, steep learning curve
  • adapter support (db adapter)
  • adapters not jca-compliant (third party)(planned for new release)
  • gui not intuative for “old school oracle people”

Those are just a subset of the comments of the attenders. Since they’re based on a little experience they can’t be seen as hard facts.
Depending on the context of the customer you need to decide what product suits best. In some situations oesb and bpel are the
best match and maybe in some other cases you need more influence on the flow in osb and want to model everything in just this product.

questions
what to model in bpel and what to model in osb?
more stable?
more mature?
how to synchronise ide project and changes made in the console?
osb versus mediator 11g, what will be the role of both?

We still need to invest some extra time to get the answers on a few of the questions, feel free to give comments!

Antony Reynold already talked a bit about the topic of the role of the different components in the new 11g suite.

Original blog

Uncategorized

"Dutch : GroenLinks wil open source in ICT-opleidingen"

Op nu.nl is een artikel te lezen over GroenLink welke graag studenten en leerlingen met een ICT-opleiding al tijdens de studie kennis wil laten maken met open source software.
Daar de studenten op dit moment voornamelijk kennis opdoen van de software van de grotere spelers in de markt, willen ze gaan kijken of ze dit niet kunnen gaan verplaatsen naar de open source markt.

Bij mijn huidige werkgevener ‘IT-eye’ begint de focus ook steeds meer te verplaatsen naar de open source wereld. Een goed voorbeeld is het seminar wat vandaag en volgende week wordt gehouden ‘Zijn Open Standaarden en Open Source Software de toekomst?’.
Vanuit de overheids klandizie komt ook steeds meer de vraag om onderzoek te doen naar open source varianten voor betaalde componenten die momenteel bij bv gemeentes zijn ingezet. Een goed voorbeeld is een huidige poc waar ik mee bezig ben waarin we onderzoeken wat de mogelijkheden zijn van Mule ESB.

Zeker in de huidige tijd van ‘economische crisis’ verleggen niet alleen de klanten maar ook de ontwikkelbedrijven zelf hun werkgebied naar open source.
De bestedingen voor nieuwe projecten vindt langzaam aan zijn vlucht ook weer enigzins omhoog, dus langzaam aan zullen de nieuwe projecten op dit gebied ook weer opgestart worden.

Mooie kansen voor bedrijven om software in te zetten met een brede community achter zich en welke ook nog eens velen malen voordeliger of gratis zal zijn.
Daarnaast voor ons ontwikkelaars een mooie kans om mee te gaan in de huidige marktontwikkelingen en de kennis uit te breiden of te verleggen naar open source.

Original blog

esb

Oracle Workshop for Weblogic 10gR3: "requested array is larger than heap"

little note to myself

During development for the osb pop-ups from eclipse keep coming by : “requested array is larger than heap”
Fix for me :
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=847409&tstart=0

goto :
[sourcecode language=’xml’]
\osb30\user_projects\workspaces\\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.wst.server.core\publish\
[/sourcecode]

and delete the publish*.dat

change startup settings of eclipse
see help from workshop ide itself, topic “Allocating enough memory and solving OutOfMemoryErrors”
eclipse -vmargs -Xmx

Original blog

esb

The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Service Buses, Q1 2009

Last month The Forrester released their evaluation of some of the vendors of enterprise services buses for Q1 of 2009.
It gives a good overview of the core and extended functions of the daily ESBs and the strengths and weaknesses of the vendors (for both the licensed and open source esbs).

Go read it!

Original blog

application server, glassfish

GlassFish, The Google Trends

The Aquarium posted some lately stats about the usage of the Glassfish application server.
Nice to see it’s coming close at some points to the JBoss application server (i think the one which is his closest competitor).
At the 10th of february a nice heap when Sun announces his “Sun GlassFish Portfolio”.

If we take the stats of some other big competitors in the charts we’ll notice a few differences.
When we take oracle as and ibm websphere together with glassfish and jboss i guess the last 2 still got a long way to go, but they are growing!

comparing all 4
trend1
trend2
trend3

comparing glassfish and jboss
trend4
trend5
trend6

At this moment IBM and Oracle are still the big players on this market, let’s see what GlassFish will do in the near future it’s getting more popularity lately.

Original blog