Mashed Articles

The Devoxx conference is the place to be for everyone interested in Java and related techologies. And as one of the members of the steering team, I’m proud (again) on the impressive list of speakers we’ve gathered. My personal focus and interest is SOA and Cloud Computing. And that will definitely be covered at Devoxx!

University Day 1 – Monday Nov 16
The Cambrian Cloud Computing Explosion – John M Willis
Got to know John though his podcasts. John has a strong background in systems management and Tivoli, but his current focus is Cloud. And rest assured that he knows what a cloud is and knows all the players. For all the could enthusiastics: strongly recommended!
jBPM in Action – Tom Baeyens
Tom is “mister jBPM”, the main driver behind jBPM, the JBoss BPM offering.
Architecting Robust Applications for Amazon EC2 – Chris Richardson
Chris is the founder of CloudFoundry. CloudFoundry provides tooling (and more) to deploy Java applications on Amazon EC2.
Note: CloudFoundry got acquired by SpringSource and SpringSource in turn got acquired by VMWare. Which is interesting as Amazon and VMWare are seen as big competing players in the cloud space.
SOA, OpenESB and OpenSSO Programming with Passion! – Sang Shin
Talk will be based on Sang’s free online SOA course material.

University Day 2 – Tuesday Nov 16
Google App Engine for Java – a real live voyage to The Cloud
Develop along with the speakers your first (or next) application on the Google App Engine. No sales pitch, as the speakers are – Sam Brodkin and Scott Stevenson – are independent(s).
SOA In Practice – Nicolai Josuttis
Nicolas is the author of the book “SOA in practice“. One of the better SOA books in my opinion.

Conference Day 1 – Wednesday Nov 17
ESB’s and WebServices in Practice – Nicolai Josuttis
Once more Nicolas, but now with a more focused talk on the use of ESB’s.
Architecting Robust Applications for Amazon EC2 – Chris Richardson
A condensed version of the University talk.
jBPM4 in Action – Tom Baeyens
A shortened version, ideal if you went to the cloud talk of John Willis on Monday.
Keeping Your Options Open, Even if the Cloud is Not – Doug Tidwell
Another specialist wrt. XSLT 2.0, but that’s not the topic of this session. Doug will rather talk about the different Cloud offerings and standardization in the cloud space.
Distributed Programming the Google Way – Gregor Hohpe
Gregor is famous for his Integration Patterns. Focus of this talk are the base technologies underlying the Google imperium and the Google cloud solutions.

Conference Day 2 – Thrusday Nov 18
Using XML with Java: Spoilt for Choice? – Michael Kay
Michael Kay is the author of the Saxon XSLT and XQuery processor. Michael is “Mr XSLT”. XML remains an important aspect of SOA and general (Java) development.
Note: actually we have 2nd XSLT guru at Devoxx, Doug Tidwell
Google Appengine Java: Groovy baby! – Patrick Chanezon and Guillaume Laforge
Another perspective on the Google AppEngine with focus on running different JVM based languages on Google AppEngine.
Master Data Management – Pierre Bonnet
Master Data Mangement is another important aspect of a SOA. Speaker is Pierre Bonnet, founder of the MDM Alliance Group.

Conference Day 3 – Friday Nov 19
BPM in a SOA Environment – Paul Brown
Paul Brown is the author of 2 great SOA books, is an architect at Tibco, but most importantly he is a senior, mild and fluent speaker on SOA. For this Devoxx talk, we have asked Paul to focus on BPM. Recommended!
Open Source SOA with Fuse – James Strachan
James is involved in a tremendous number of open source projects, usually focused on SOA and integraton, with ActiveMQ and ServiceMix being the most well known. Will be interesting to learn about the status of Fuse, the ESB based on ServiceMix.
Note: in particular as Progress acquired Iona and is behind FuseSource
Note 2: for those who remember the CXF WS framework, that’s part of Fuse

See you at Devoxx!

An important part of every ESB is transformation. Most ESB’s use an XML representation internally. Non-XML messages are first converted to an XML representation and vice-versa. The conversion between non-XML and XML representations can become a challenge (and transformation) in itself.

The main transformation logic in (most) ESB’s thus becomes XML-2-XML. Most ESB’s use XLST for transformation (BizTalk, IBM ESB, Tibco BW, Oracle SOA, …). And most commercial integration tools still use XSLT 1.0.

But there is another XML standard technology that can be used for transformations: XQuery. The only ‘big’ player in the integration world supporting XQuery is BEA AquaLogic. Obviously, the ESB’s such as Mule or WSO2 ESB provide XQuery support as wll.

Regardless of the big discussions on XSLT vs. XQuery, I think XQuery would be a very welcome addition in the toolset of integration developers. Adding an XQuery transformation component in the palette of building blocks can’t be that hard.

The IDE support for XQuery is obviously more complex. Development of XML assets such as XML Schema’s and XSLT transformation is better supported in 3rd party XML tools anyway.

PS: haven’t used it yet, but the XQuery support in StylusStudio looks as good as their XSLT support

I’m always on the lookout for good books in the area of Integration, SOA, BPM and Web Services. I recently skimmed through a couple. None of them are medal winners, but some parts are worth the read.

Through my ACM membership, I have access to a limited list of books on books24x7. One of them was “Enterprise Architecture and Integration – Methods, Implementation, and Technologies“. Each chapter is written by a different group of authors. The quality of the different chapters and authors varies strongly. The best part is the 1st chapter, written by Wing Lam and Venky Shankararaman, the editors themselves. It is really great! The authors give a great overview on EAI and its relationship with SOA/BPM. The following chapters by differents authors are (in my opinion) of lower quality. The 4th chapter was interesting again as it discussed SAP Netweaver and SAP XI.
If you have access to books24x7, go check out that 1st chapter. But don’t spend your money on the book itself.

Via pdfchm.com, I stumbled upon “SOA Approach to Integration – XML, Web Services, ESB and BPEL in real-world SOA projects” by by Matjaz B. Juric, Ramesh Loganathan, Poornachandra Sarang and Frank Jennings. The combination of SOA and Integration in the title set my expectations high. The 1st and 2nd chapter are nice introductory material. But further down, the chapters don’t go into much detail. E.g. the BPEL chapter is really about the BPEL XML syntax.

Another book available on pdfchm.com is “SOA and WS-BPEL” by Yuli Vasiliev. The title of the book should rather be “PHP and Web Services”. The book is well written. Chapters 1 to 4 go into The 5th chapter goes into BPEL; The 6th and last chapter shows how to implement an example using ActiveBPEL. And although I don’t know much about PHP, the books looks very interesting for PHP developers.