Oisín Hurley's Weblog

I've just arrived in Phoenix for the Gartner Open Source Summit and to get a chance to see how the other third lives - I've spoken to OSS developers at ApacheCon, OSS users and extenders at EclipseWorld and now I'm going to get a chance to talk to Directors of IT Planning, Directors on Information Services, Lead Technical Architects and suchlike.

This, I should add, is the same Gartner from which an SVP went on record last year saying that open source could have a damaging impact on software innovation.

We'll see if the opinion has changed - from my own perspective, it would appear that the total opposite is true.

Also, this is my first time in Arizona. It's 100°F (a change from 59°F in Dublin) and I'm delighted to see that the skies do indeed have lots of little fluffy clouds.

The opening keynote of the conference was given by Don Tapscott, co-author of the well-known Paradigm Shift and author of many other interesting treatises. In his presentation, he explored and explained what he termed the Participation Age, in which those of us who are privileged enough to have access to globe-spanning communications tools can join together as independent actors in a powerful peer production effort, free of hierarchies and centralized control.

He articulated the business benefits of exposing corporate information to take advantage of a peer production effort - the striking example was that of goldcorp, who revealed geosurvey data on a large area of land and offered prizes for those who could pick the strongest locations for gold. They spent $500000 on prizes, and in return were presented with locations that later product $3.5 billion worth of the metal.

He spoke of other 'open source' efforts - such as SpikeSource for applications, the MIT Open Courseware project and school- and text-book efforts at GlobalText and Wikibooks.

He talked about new approaches to traditional business, such as the development of prosumers that consume your goods, but also in turn produce material (extensions to goods, etc) for you.

Overall, it was a good enough keynote for the occasion, giving a broad overview of situations in many businesses where 'open source' has been of clear advantage and linking the individual successes with an overall trend. No explanation for the trend itself -- but I suspect that it could be related to the co-option of the commons by corporate interests, viz. the purposing of the web and internet to the creation of new commons.

An open source 'mastermind' panel was held at the Gartner conference last week. Mike Milinkovich of Eclipse, Brian Behlendorf of Apache and Collabnet and Stuart Cohen of OSDL.

I diligently wrote down all of the conversation until, unused to actually using a non-keyboarded writing instrument, I cramped up :-)

Luckily Zack Urlocker was much more diligent than I, and captured pretty much everything in a blog entry - to which I redirect you. Further analysis can be found on Ian Skerrett's blog - Ian is the Director of Marketing at the Eclipse Foundation.

Ok, this is the last entry on the Gartner OSS Summit, I promise. And, rather a regurgitation of the keynotes, etc, it's my own impressions.

It was surprising to me to see how many of the attendees were au fait with Open Source software being used in their organizations. It was even more surprising to see how many of those who were purposefully using Open Source actually changed the source to meet their needs -- unfortunately I couldn't get any information on how many of the changers submitted patches.

Conversing with individuals that stopped by the IONA booth showed a vast continuum of experience with OSS. For example, one visitor, employed by an enormous and well-known bank, spends his time working in a group that performs risk assessments on OSS and approves it for use in the IT infrastructure. Other visitors from budget-free government organizations were keen to make progress on projects using the lack of license fee as the carrot to lure their patrons. Some others were a little frightened by the whole thing, but of course, felt reassured by Gartner :-)

A brief aside - earlier on this year I attended a talk at Engineers Ireland on the merits, and de-merits of Open Source. The protagonists were IBM and Microsoft. I went hoping for a least a minor bunfight, if not a celebrity deathmatch smackdown. Alas, this was not to be as each side of the affair merely introduced Open Source from the perspective of their business models, which are discrete and different. However, one developer person that was there came out with a most excellent question that I will have to paraphrase:

But doesn't that mean that a developer that does Open Source is debasing their skills and going to put themselves out of job?

The overall message here is that while awareness of OSS is heading towards an acceptable level in the 'industry' (that's the Silicon Valley definition of the word, not the Hollywood one), there's still a lot of education to do at the level of the usual corporate decision-maker. Enterprising and visionary individuals continue to market OSS, but having an organization like Gartner, who really are at the top of opinion-maker peak for the traditional big-company IT development teams, pushing OSS as a good thing for business is a very powerful boost.

It's expected that once you have an interface language, like WSDL or CORBA IDL, that you will have a suite of tools that allows you to generate stubs, skeletons, starting code, tests and so forth from the basic interface description in the implementation language of your choice. This is a very important productivity element for any developer, as having to code up server skeletons by hand is just an outrageously dull task.

When I was putting together CORBA systems, I used a tool called idlgen which saved huge amounts of time by generating complete test suites with randomized data, and allowed you to produce stubs, skeletons and mainline code in a jiffy. In my current work, I'm using EMF to represent a suite of models, from which I generate implementation code.

But there's one thing that's starting to bug me about some code generation tools, and here I'm talking about one particular tool that is almost always called wsdl2java, and that is there are so many of them. Everyone! Stop writing new wsdl2java tools and just write a wsdl2star tool instead! Take wsdl4j or Woden as your model and write some backend processing that allows people to develop Velocity templates, or write JavaScript/E4X code to generate the necessary. Wrap all of this up in a single Open Source project and kick-off a community of Open Source script/template developers so that other projects can contribute their code generation incantations (there's your regression test suite too, by the way).

Is there someone doing this already? Let me know if you find them!

Or, in this case, the incubating projects. Apache Yoko incubator has published an M1 release. Yoko (no, I don't know why it's called that) is a fast Java CORBA server which can be used in Open Source JVM and JEE implementations. Hot on it's heels, it looks like the Apache CXF (yes, I know why it is called that - don't ask) is gearing up to an imminent 2.0-M1 release. CXF should be very interesting to people who are doing JAX-WS service development - I have been using it myself in another project and it has worked very well.

Back in the SOA Tools Platform project we're adding UI support for JAX-WS service development and we are testing against CXF to make sure that we are generating the correct classes and dealing with the JAX-WS and other annotations in the right way.

What a start to a new year - finding ones phyzz adorning the front page of The Server Side! Steve and myself did a piece before the holiday where we spoke about the company we work for and some of our favourite topics. link

Now I know what the phrase you have a great face for radio really means.

These entries are being posted ex post facto to the conference - I just haven't yet got the hang of real-time blogging!

I managed to get one demo, one long talk and a panel in today. Lunch and part of the afternoon got subsumed by meetings and general corridor work. I was also developing some ideas to bring to the ServerSide Java Symposium in Barcelona in June. Here's the roundup:

Getting Hooked on Equinox

The presenters talked about and demonstrated two great applications of this technology. The first was the capability to load classes from a memory mapped archive or indeed shared memory, rather than from a JAR files. The second used AspectJ to weave incoming class files and instrument them for monitoring.

Extending WTP Using Project Facets

This long talk gave a full introduction to the facets facility in WTP. Facets can be associated with Eclipse projects, as metadata to describe capabilities, or requirements. For example, a project can be given the jst.web facet, to indicate that it is a web application. In this way, facets are similar to Eclipse natures, but the advantages that facets provide is that they are versioned and may have information about other facets that they require to function, and facets with which they conflict. All in all it's a cool approach and I certainly think we should consider using it in SOA Tools - we currently use natures to mark JAX-WS and SCA projects, but the versioning feature of facets would be very useful here as these approaches are standards and will move on over time.

Adopting WTP in Your Products

This session was a panel, hosted by Bill Roth of BEA. The panellists were asked a number of questions about how they have adopted WTP as part of their product suite. The most interesting thing I got from this session was an insight into SAP's open source strategy, which is more about take than give: the SAP representative on the panel showed some serious frustration at not being permitted by his employer to actually commit code back into the Eclipse commons. This cleared up something for me: I know that there are some guys in SAP Labs in Bulgaria (video link) working with SOA Tools, so on a recent IM session with an insider, I dropped some dark hints about contributions. The response was along the lines of "our Open Source strategy is difficult to explain". I guess that in the fullness of time, SAP will get its head straight on OSS and be more forthcoming. We live in hope.

Day 3, Wednesday, and at this stage in the conference I feel as if I have been dragged through a hedge. I'm not the only one, as lots of the people I've talked to have been here since Sunday and the adrenaline is starting to fade. This has nothing to do with a number of BoF sessions that provided free beer late into the night, nor has it to do with mojito-fuelled technical and project discussions. More on that in a later entry.

Today was the big day for the guys in the SOA Tools BPMN sub-project. I introduced their long talk From Modelling to Execution in the Enterprise - using BPMN and BPEL to a crowd of around 60 people, which was an excellent attendance. Antoine and Hugues did a a great job of bringing the audience through BPMN and how it can be mapped to and from BPEL.

I was due to do my talk on SOA Tools the next day, so an early night was in order. There was an IONA round-up at Pedro's and then it was back to base to sand down the corners of the presentation.

The last day of EclipseCon was SOA Tools talk day. I spent the early part of the day working on the presentaiton (which you can find if you follow the previous link). The talk itself went well - there was an audience of about 40 or so, and there wasn't much attrition towards the end. In the talk we covered some of the technology that had been put into the SOA Tools project, and gave an update of progress and a draft roadmap.

This week I'm attending the TSS Java Symposium, which is taking place in Barcelona. I have a talk to give on using OSS in enterprise environements (will link to slides later), plus I've been asked to sit on a panel with Martin Fowler and Gregor Hohpe on SOA. It will be unusual to talk to these guys, having studied their work :)

I got a chance to attend, and speakThe ServerSide Java Symposium in Barcelona at the end of June. The talk I gave was about how Enterprise Software can be delivered using Open Source as the basis for satisfying some of the most common Enterprise Software requirements. I wasn't talking about business logic here -- I was talking about the nonbiosphere that surrounds a piece of Enterprise software, including process automation support, addressing chargeback in a transparent manner, managing middleware heterogeneity. I also guaranteed the listeners that I wouldn't use any buzzwords :)

You can download the slides and notes and check it out. From the top of the room, I observed the reaction: a healthy mix of boredom, horror, torpor, confusion, outrage, interest, catatonia and crackberry tapping. After the talk, I did get some compliments and interesting questions. No pitchforks and torches, so that was good.

On the subject of pitchforks and torches, I was lucky enough to be invited to sit on a SOA Industry Leaders Panel with Martin Fowler and Gregor Hohpe. It was an interesting thing to site between those two guys, whose books and articles I've avidly consumed in the past. Mainly I worried about looking like a total idiot. According to Jay at DeCare Systems, I did ok - if you read that entry, you'll see the torches reference I made earlier.The whole thing was filmed, so perhaps we will get to see it online sometime. The panel moderator, the inimitable Ted Neward, gets my vote for best panel mod evah, coaxing some excellent tough questions from what turned out to be a good audience. It was with a mental sigh of relief from me that Gregor got in first on the inevitable What is a Service, anyway?.

Update - check out Ade's experiences at TSSJS

I'm waiting for my flight to Frankfurt to attend the Eclipse Summit Europe that is being held in sunny Ludwigsburg, in Germany. Due to a typical pebkac error, I'll be staying in 3 hotels over the 5 days that I will be there :)

The Euro Summit is an interesting conference - the content is usually good, the venues conducive to meeting people and of course the German beer is without peer. This adds up to a fun-filled few days. During the conference, Adrian from STP will be updating us on what's new and noteworthy on the project, and of course bringing us up to date on the old material too. One of the evenings will contain an STP BoF, although the date has to be confirmed.

I had the pleasure to share a drink and a chat last night with Ed Merks, the EMF Project lead. One of the interesting things that he brought up was his efforts to extend the EMF URIHandlers to be more REST-like. He mentions this in a blog entry - you will find the reference after the picture of the hibiscus. There are some more techcore details at the Bugzilla entry that hosts the patch.

This work is a big thing for EMF, in my opinion. Putting this together with a simple HttpService instance in an OSGi container can give you the basis for remotely manipulable models, with most of the work done by EMF itself. This opens up the field for Rich Internet Applications (blach - another buzzword) that can interact with hosted EMF models without having to depend on having an EMF library on the client side.

The Artix Repository product that IONA ships has done something very similar, but we have created the RESTful interactions outside of EMF. It's cool to see this kind of capability moving into the core.

Eclipse users and developers know that the Eclipse platform is a bit of beast - there is just so much in there that if you don't get the chance to poke your head out of your own personal Eclipse-interaction light cone, you can miss out on some cool stuff. And it turns out that the best way to do that is to come to these kind of conferences :) Here's some things I found out about yesterday.

Plugin Spy
Select something in the UI, hit Alt+Shift+F1, and you get a window containing an introspection of the current widget/part that you have selected. Check out the PDE Incubator page, and a blog entry from Chris. If you are using Eclipse 3.4M2 or later, you will find this feature already built-in.

Clean Ups
I use Checkstyle in most of my project work, and it and I have an uneasy relationship. The sort of one where the dishes get broken and people come around to bring the pets away. I have always whined that if Checkstyle is so smart, why doesn't it get rid of that trailing space it spotted for me and stop bothering me? Well, it can't do that, but Eclipse Clean Ups can. Woot!

A Clean Up is just a collection of refactorings that you use regularly on your code to keep it squeaky. You can run 'em manually, or have them run automatically when you save a Java file. Go to this developerworks article to find out more.

EclEmma
If you are familiar with the Emma Project then you will have probably guessed that this is a test coverage tool for Eclipse, based upon Emma. I've always found test coverage to be an invaluable tool for showing you where the great, gaping, black holes of non-deterministic behaviour reside in your code. There's a lot of tools that can do coverage, and there are Eclipse integrations at varying levels of quality. What I liked about EclEmma is that it is quick and straightforward to use on a single Eclipse project, and gives me the results fast. Although the results are not always welcome :)

Update: Jeff McAffer's Eclipse Update Talk [pdf link] has details of Plug-in Spy and Clean Ups.

At the Eclipse Summit 2007, Jeff McAffer gave a presentation [link to slides not available yet] on what has been happening with Equinox. I missed the talk itself, but later on I had lunch with him, Naci Dai of WebTools and Jerry Preissler of Swordfish and we talked about the Eclipse Provisioning Project, aka p2

p2 is a framework which is all about configuring things and putting them somewhere. That's as generic as I can make the definition :) In the example on the website, p2 is being used to move bundles around. The SoaTools, Swordfish and WebTools projects already do this kind of thing, and we have a set of deployment frameworks which allow us to configure and deliver things (WAR files for example) to different places (server runtimes for example). That's why we are interested, especially since there are visible moves in the direction of OSGi based runtimes for hosting Services .

I'm just at the point where I need to drill into the information on the web. As per usual, I'm confused about how p2 and Buckminster appear to do exactly the same thing. And I want to see how p2 matches up with the SoaTools SOAS component. If we could do something around extending p2 (if appropriate) then we could reduce the STP workload a bit. I guess that WTP and Swordfish are thinking the same thing.

I feel a workshop coming on here :)

A tangential point: as far as I know, and I am open to correction here, the p2 project was brought into the Eclipse ecosystem as an effort to replace the aging Update Manager mechanisms. Certainly over the course of the last couple of years, many interesting behaviours of the UM have come to light, but it might have been a good idea to fix those in conjunction with starting a new development effort. As per usual, if you have patches, feel free to open a bugzilla :)

Another tangential point: there is a project proposal called Riena which will also be interested in the p2 capabilities. I don't yet understand what Riena is trying to do - all I know is that it is about 'smart clients', the committers are mostly tall, and that they all wear the same teeshirts. When I find out more I'll let you know. In the meantime visit the top-level page on wiki for p2 for details.

Waay back in May last year, I wrote a little blog entry taking WSDL and associated tools to task. You can imagine my delight when my esteemed colleague Guillaume Nodet sent me a link to a Google Code project called Relax-WS.

The author states

WSDL is a key technology for SOA, and yet creating and editing these files is about as much fun as straightening all the noodles in a bowl of spaghetti with a pair of tweezers.

and goes on to promise

all good, right and true, in my opinion. I would go even further on the last quote there and say that Relax-WS should aim to provide the simple, programmer-friendly syntax, but should also lose any metadata that is not necessary and add metadata where it is missing from WSDL.

One comment I have on the Relax-WS approach is a reaction to the sample code that is on the front page

service Hello {
  port {
    operation SayHello {
      in {
        element name {xsd:string}
      }
      out {
        element message {xsd:string}
      }
    }
  }
}

What's wrong with this, you might ask? It's clear and concise. Indeed it is, say I, and there is nothing at all wrong here, but the bit that makes me somewhat uncomfortable is the use of the service term there. Once you start to mention services, you are looking at a crossover from definition of schema and operation to a service provider definition, which necessarily leads on to having concrete pseudo-physical resource details in the Relax-WS file. What's a pseudo-physical resource? It's an artifact that has a constraints on a machine - so things like ports, databases, file systems, etc fall under this category. If you nail down your pseudo-physical resources at development time, then you are in for a reduced amount of fun when it comes to deployment. Ideally, you bind all those pp-resource details at the last minute (delay your decisions -- a lean maxim), so when you are developing you should set up the capability to discover those details at start up time from a fixed place, rather than baking them in.

A good example would be coding a Spring application for the ServiceMix 4 kernel, burning in the configuration into the bundle, and then binding it to a little properties file that contains the pp-resource specifics for the particular [virtual] machine upon which it is to be hosted.

Anyway - fair play to the author of Relax-WS for taking this on. I'm sure there will be take-up of the project.