Why JeAS?

I've been saying for a while that the last thing the industry needs is a return the days of vendor lock-in or somehow resetting the clock on the past 40+ years of middleware and rediscovering it all again. That's why I believe we have to leverage what we've got. Yes, it needs to morph and evolve, but we should start using (reusing) existing investments. Furthermore, I believe that if the ideals behind Cloud are to be realised then they must start by tackling existing workloads.

This is why the application server (no formal definition in this article) is the right vehicle for applications. It doesn't matter whether you just consider this to be Tomcat or your favourite application server (JBoss, of course!), whatever is hosting your important applications today and which your developers are comfortable with, that's the basis of your own PaaS requirements. Therefore, that has to be the basis for PaaS wherever you may want to deploy in the future. But even today you often find that your application server may be providing more functionality than you need, at least initially. Just considering Java Enterprise Edition for a moment, that's one of the reasons behind the introduction of profiles (which always reminded me of the Core Services Framework Bluestone/HP pushed back in 2000, driven by my friend and co-author Jon Maron).

So this is where I come from when I mention Just Enough Application Server: when deploying into a PaaS you really need support from your underlying application server to ensure that just enough is deployed and no more. Ideally this should be done automatically as your appliance is generated, but static is OK too. Throw in a bit of autonomous monitoring and management in case things change on the fly (application and object migration is a distinct possibility, so the underlying infrastructure/application server needs to be able to cope), and you've got yourself one super sleek PaaS.

JeAS

First there was JeOS, which makes sense for IaaS. So what's the equivalent for PaaS? Well I reckon it's Just Enough Application Server (JeAS perhaps?) More on this subject soon!

JCP Award Nominations are open

Cross linking to the award notification.

Has Java reached a point of inflection?

I've been wondering about this for a while. As far as languages go, Java has experienced a good run, remaining in the number 1 or 2 spot for the better part of a decade. The language came along as the Web was really growing from its fairly basic roots as it's arguable that Java influenced the development of it more than many languages. It certainly took over from the likes of Pascal and C/C++ in universities and as a result most new software developers have more than a passing knowledge of the language. Of course it's never been a perfect language (I'm not sure such a thing will ever exist, except for very domain-specific languages); it's also never been my favourite language (C++ still holds that position.) However, I think that Java has had an overall positive affect on the industry.

The Java platform (formerly known as J2EE) took a few years to emerge after the first releases of Java (aka Oak) and initially competed with CORBA in the non-Microsoft camp. Once it was clear that J2EE would dominate, CORBA tried to embrace it more closely (the CORBA Component Model, for instance) but was never quite the force it once was. However, J2EE wasn't perfect and a lot of that could be traced to its CORBA roots. It wasn't really until EE5 and EE6 that it managed to escape those shackles, but even despite those problems it dominated the industry. Of course it's precisely because of some of these issues that frameworks such as Spring sprang (!) up, but even then a lot of those deployments ran on J2EE to simplify development.

During its life Sun was a pretty good custodian of the language and the platform. Yes there were issues, particularly when Sun moved from being a neutral party to one that competed in the vendor landscape. But when you think about how one other company in a similar position handled a similar position in the 80's and 90's, things could have been a lot less open. In fact I'm certain that the success of both the language and the platform is due in no small part to this relative openness that Sun managed to juggle, despite their conflicts of interest. Towards the end of their life as an independent company, with the likes of the Apache License issue, it was obvious that Sun couldn't quite make the necessary leap that was/is required to continue the dominance of the language/platform (and you could argue to revitalize it).

And of course that brings us to the present and Oracle. If Java was at a point of inflection prior to their acquisition of Sun, it continues to be there today many months afterwards. Myself and others have argued that this is a good opportunity for Oracle to "do the right thing" and make good on their previous statements in that regard. To continue without such change risks pushing us over that tipping point, with fragmentation, vendor specific options and the end of the world as we know it. (OK, that last point is unlikely to happen!) As I've been saying around Cloud, we really shouldn't be looking at turning back the clock: it won't do anyone, including Oracle, any good.

Now maybe Oracle are considering making some positive announcements at the forthcoming JavaOne. I hope so. Continuing to make Java open and fast moving will benefit everyone, customers and vendors alike. And hopefully Oracle can make the leap that Sun never seemed to be able to make. What's that they say about Nixon and China?

Red Hat/Newcastle University research day

Just back from the first official research day with Newcastle University and it was good. We covered a lot of short and long term research areas, including fault tolerance, scalability, event processing and policy definition/management. It all had a very heavy practical slant to it, which is event better given that we're hoping to see a lot of this come through into various JBoss/Red Hat projects and products eventually. All in all it was a good day and hopefully next time we'll take a couple of days so we can delve into things in much more detail. But for now I've got to go through my notes and start working on getting these R&D efforts underway!

JUDCon Europe 2010

I've mentioned JUDCon before, and it's only been a couple of weeks since we had the very first event in Boston, which went very well. However, no time to relax since it was always our intention to have a couple of these a year and it's surprising how much lead time you need to make it happen. So we've decided on the dates and location for the European event: 7th and 8th of October in Berlin. Next up is figuring out the themes for the tracks and then we'll open up the call for presentations.

Cloud-TM project

We're involved with a new EU Research project called Cloud-TM. Should be some good opportunities for long term research and development, whilst at the same time having strong industrial relevance. I'm looking forward to the kick-off meeting next week in Portugal!

DO'h!!

I've given countless presentations at many different events over the years and usually I'll either be on time or run slightly over time. On a few occasions I've finished early, but never have I finished 20 minutes early thinking that I was over time! I started my first JBoss World presentation this year at 10:20am and got into my stride. I think I got too caught up in what I was saying because at some point I looked down at my watch and noticed it was 10:50am. I obviously forgot what time I'd started because the only thought that ran through my mind was "Oh sh*t, where did the time go, I've only got 10 minutes left!" I managed to get through the remaining 10 slides or so by skipping some (fortunately they'll all be available on the web) and got into Q&A time, still blissfully unaware that I still had 20 minutes remaining. In fact it wasn't until I was walking away that someone pointed it out! So, if you were in that session I definitely apologise for rushing needlessly!

MW4SOC CFP

CALL FOR PAPERS
===============

+--------------------------------------------------------+
| 5th Middleware for Service-Oriented Computing (MW4SOC) |
| Workshop at the ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware Conference |
+--------------------------------------------------------+

Nov 29 Dec 3, 2010
Bangalore, India
http://www.dedisys.org/mw4soc10/

This workshop has its own ISBN and will be included in the ACM digital library.

Important Dates
===============
Paper submission: August 1, 2010
Author notification: September 15, 2010
Camera-ready copies: October 1, 2010
Workshop date: November 30, 2010

Call details
============
The initial visionary promise of Service Oriented Computing (SOC) was a world of cooperating services being loosely coupled to flexibly create dynamic business processes and agile applications that may span organisations and heterogeneous computing platforms but can nevertheless adapt quickly and autonomously to changes of requirements or context. Today, the influence of SOC goes far beyond the initial concepts of the original disciplines that spawned it. Many would argue that areas like business process modelling and management, Web2.0-style applications, data as a service, and even cloud computing emerge mainly due to the shift in paradigm towards SOC. Nevertheless, there is still a strong need to merge technology with an understanding of business processes and organizational structures.

While the immediate need of middleware support for SOC is evident, current approaches and solutions still fall short by primarily providing support for only the intra-enterprise aspect of SOC and do not sufficiently address issues such as service discovery, re-use, re-purpose, composition and aggregation support, service management, monitoring, and deployment and maintenance of large-scale heterogeneous infrastructures and applications. Moreover, quality properties (in particular dependability and security) need to be addressed not only by interfacing and communication standards, but also in terms of actual architectures, mechanisms, protocols, and algorithms. Challenges are the administrative heterogeneity, the loose coupling between coarse-grained operations and long-running interactions, high dynamicity, and the required flexibility during run-time. Recently, massive-scale and mobility were added to the challenges for Middleware for SOC.

These considerations also lead to the question to what extent service-orientation at the middleware layer itself is beneficial (or not). Recently emerging "Infrastructure as a Service" and "Platform as a Service" offerings, from providers like Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, or from the open source community, support this trend towards cloud computing which provides corresponding services that can be purchased and consumed over the Internet. However, providing end-to-end properties and addressing cross-cutting concerns like dependability, security, and performance in cross-organizational SOC is a particular challenge and the limits and benefits thereof have still to be investigated.

The workshop consequently welcomes contributions on how specifically service oriented middleware can address the above challenges, to what extent it has to be service oriented by itself, and in particular how quality properties are supported.

Topics of interest
==================
* Architectures and platforms for Middleware for SOC.
* Core Middleware support for deployment, composition, and interaction.
* Integration of SLA (service level agreement) and/or technical policy support through middleware.
* Middleware support for service management, maintenance, monitoring, and control.
* Middleware support for integration of business functions and organizational structures into Service oriented Systems (SOS).
* Evaluation and experience reports of middleware for SOC and service oriented middleware.

Workshop co-chairs
===============
Karl M. Göschka (chair)
Schahram Dustdar
Frank Leymann
Helen Paik

Organizational chair
====================
Lorenz Froihofer, mw4soc@dedisys.org

Program committee
=================
Paul Brebner, NICTA (Australia)
Gianpaolo Cugola, Politecnico di Milano (Italy)
Walid Gaaloul, Institut Telecom (France)
Harald C. Gall, Universität Zürich (Switzerland)
Nikolaos Georgantas, INRIA (France)
Chirine Ghedira, Univ. of Lyon I (France)
Svein Hallsteinsen, SINTEF (Norway)
Yanbo Han, ICT Chinese Academy of Sciences (China)
Valérie Issarny, INRIA (France)
Mehdi Jazayeri, Università della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland)
Bernd Krämer, University of Hagen (Germany)
Mark Little, JBoss (USA)
Heiko Ludwig, IBM Research (USA)
Hamid Reza Motahari Nezhad, HP Labs (USA)
Nanjangud C. Narendra, IBM Research (India)
Rui Oliveira, Universidade do Minho (Portugal)
Cesare Pautasso, Università della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland)
Fernando Pedone, Università della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland)
Jose Pereira, Universidade do Minho (Portugal)
Florian Rosenberg, Vienna University of Technology (Austria)
Giovanni Russello, Create-Net (Italy)
Regis Saint-Paul, CREATE-NET (Italy)
Dietmar Schreiner, Vienna University of Technology (Austria)
Bruno Schulze, National Lab for Scientific Computing (Brazil)
Francois Taiani, Lancaster University (UK)
Aad van Moorsel, University of Newcastle (UK)
Roman Vitenberg, University of Oslo (Norway)
Michael Zapf, Universität Kassel (Germany)
Liming Zhu, NICTA (Australia)

JBossWorld and JUDCon

Off to Boston tomorrow for JBossWorld and JUDCon. The former is always a good event, but it's really the latter that I'm looking forward to the most, since it's the first ever one and it's taken us a while to organize. I'm already working on the European version that'll be coming in a few months time so hope to get some constructive feedback from the people to attend in the coming few days. And for my long flight to Boston I'm having a complete break and finishing reviewing someone's PhD thesis.

Classic paper

I came across this paper in my pile of printed materials from when I was doing my PhD. Great paper at the time and still applicable today. Well worth a read.

One of the best books I've ever read ...

I didn't realise that To Kill A Mockingbird was almost 50 years old! It's definitely one of the best books I read (while a teenager at school) and I go back to it every few years. It surprised me how much I loved the book from the start given that at the time sci fi and fantasy were the mainstays of my library. But from the age of 13 or 14 to the present day it's definitely something that I recall in vivid detail. And of course Gregory Peck makes a great (if not quite old enough) Atticus Finch. If you haven't read it then you should definitely do so!

When did we decide lock-in was good?

Many years ago the number of standards bodies around could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Back then, vendor lock-in was a reality and most of the time a certainty. But our industry matured and customers realised that sometimes being tied to a single vendor wasn't always a good thing. Over the next 20 years or so standards bodies have sprung up to cover almost every aspect of software. It's arguable that we now have too many standards bodies! Plus standards only work when they are based on experience and need: rushing to a standard too early in the cycle can result in something that isn't useful and may inhibit the real standard when it's needed eventually.

But I think, or at least thought, that most people, including developers and end-users, understand why standards are important. The move towards DCE, CORBA and J2EE illustrated this. Yes sometimes these standards weren't necessarily the easiest to use, but good standards should evolve to take this sort of thing into account, e.g., the differences between EE6 and J2EE 1.0 are significant in a number of areas not least of which is usability.

Furthermore a standard needs to be backed by multiple independent vendors and ideally come from an independent standards body (OK Java doesn't fit this last point, but maybe that will change some day.) So it annoys me at times when I hear the term open standard used to refer to something that may be used by many people but still only comes from a single vendor, or perhaps a couple, but certainly doesn't fit any of the generally accepted meanings of the term.

And yes this rant has been triggered by some of the recent announcements around Cloud. Maybe it's simply due to where we are in the hype curve, because I can't believe that developers and users are going to throw away the maturity of thought and process that have been built up over the past few decades concerning standards (interoperability, portability etc.) Or have the wool pulled over their eyes. Of course we need to experiment and do research, but let's not ignore the fact that there are real standards out there that either are applicable today or could be evolved to applicability by a concerted effort by many collaborating vendors and communities. You don't want to deploy your applications into a Cloud only to find that you can't get them back or can't integrate them with a partner or customer who may have chosen a different Cloud offering. That's not a Cloud, that's a prison.

Reading and not understanding

I can't remember when I first read The Innovator's Dilemma, but it was only a few years back when I first read The Tipping Point. Both are good books and compliment each other. However, some interesting conversations over the long weekend here made it clear to me that some people who say they've read them either haven't or have failed to understand them. Now it's one thing when friends fall into this category, but it's a completely different thing when it's business leaders quoting them as gospel to back up dubious choices. No individual's names and no company names, but it turns out it's quite common in our industry. Probably elsewhere too. Maybe there are some texts (books, papers etc.) where you should be forced to pass a test before being allowed to refer to them.

TweetDeck

Many of the folks at the Thinking Digital conference I'm attending are using Macs and running TweetDeck. So while sat here listening to yet another great talk, I decided to install it. Wow! I've been dabbling with twitter for a while but now I can see that others have been tweeting at me and I've not seen them until now. Apologies to everyone to which that applies! Now I may start using twitter more.

My next phone?

Last October I decided to upgrade my phone. At the time the iPhone wasn't available through my provider, so I went with the HTC Hero, running Android. It got good write-ups and I've had an interest in Android for a while. Since getting it I've enjoyed it, but it's not a match for the iPhone. The hardware is too slow, it's not as responsive, the store isn't as good, you can't (couldn't) store apps on the SD card, and there are a few other minor issues.

But I like the phone, so am glad I got it. That is until recently. My phone is running Android 1.5, and over the past 6 months we've seen 2.1 and now 2.2 come out. Now of course I could go and install these on my phone, but the "preferred" route is to get the official release from HTC, which would include their SenseUI, which is a great selling point over other Android phones and the iPhone. Yet to date there is still no official release from HTC for 2.1 and there may never be a 2.2 release for it.

Now I understand that technology can get dated and old things can't always run the new stuff. But just over 6 months after I got it I refuse to believe that my phone is outdated! Maybe this is an HTC specific issue and they really just need to get their act together. But it appears that Google would disagree and that fragmentation is inevitable. If it is then I am concerned for the future of Android.

For now I'll wait to see what comes from HTC. But when my contracts up I will likely move to an iPhone and mark my journey with Android down to experience.

Paul on PaaS

It's been a while since Paul Fremantle and I caught up, but it's good to see that we're still thinking along similar lines on a number of topics. This time it's PaaS and vendor lock-in. In fact there's a growing concern that this is something that may not be obvious to users given the amount of hype that's builing in the atomosphere.

Interesting Cloud announcement

It's another week and we have another announcement around Cloud, this time from Google. Quite interesting but the underlying message is pretty much what I said in an earlier entry: if you want to move to this type of cloud then you'd better be expecting to re-code some or all of your application. Oh joy. Here we go again! Even the tag line of "... write once, deploy anywhere" is a lot of smoke-and-mirrors. "Deploy to any one of four vendor specific Clouds, but don't forget about the lock-in potential there" would be more appropriate.

Come on guys. We really cannot afford to reinvent the world again. So as a prospective user, unless you really aren't interested in leveraging your existing investments in software and people, this looks like another non-starter. Maybe 2 out of 10 for marketing buzz, but 0 for effort.

Duane tells it like it is

I've known Duane "Chaos" Nickull for many years. He's a great guy, a good friend and knows his stuff on a range of technical and not so technical (excellent musician, for instance). His most recent post made me laugh out loud! A good entry to say the least.

Rich Frisbie

I met some really great guys when Bluestone acquired Arjuna Solutions. It was a great culture and family, one with which I'm pleased to have been involved. It's therefore very sad to hear that one of the friends I made during those years, Rich Frisbie, has passed on so suddenly and at such a young age. I wish his family all the best and will have a silent toast to Rich. 'nuff said.